Mattie Balagat is a university student living in Okayama, Japan, with roots in Pasig City. She leads public relations work at a Filipino youth environmental nonprofit and is the current Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony, her program’s student journal. She is figuring out how to somehow combine her interests in poetry, visual art, and environmental anthropology in the Philippines.
i. hazardwe have to imagine it: a satellite, in its secure orbit, shivering. below: whistling, infrared, westward: frothing about the neighbors’ banana trees, frenzied. the telenovela, still somehow louder than the braying strays. waves press in, the banner rolls out—no class! goes the first count, the next is the exhale of a match. the walls begin to sag beneath the sky, betray waterproofed courage. a seasonal faith mumbles to the altar. the wind arrives before we. imagine.ii. disasterin between lifting the pieces of this household—quick, the albums— we are drawn to the spectacle outside the window, now at our door. the banging of distant somethings and the rushing of rivers and the overturning and all, about, above. rat piss, tarp, fences, the presence then absence of, the unbearable slowness of the end. what are stairs without a roof? our lungs steel as our hands forget themselves. the bared neighborhood communes in each other’s knee-deep fear, since this is the way we know not to drowniii. tragedyfor miles and miles is mud. even the bottled water in the evacuation center tastes like it. the mud is intractable, and nothing is distinguishable in its throes: pant leg, motorcycle, debris, chests, figures, we, mud. nude and noiseless, save the children. the mud clumps and splatters on the papers, nameless. the paddling dog is better remembered; they, unsure that they are of this earth, to mud we are made to return.