"Stratocumulus Saturday" and more work by Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
Stratocumulus Saturday
Asking nothing to begin.
You want to eat warm bread
with someone, make the smallest
talk, but not anything to get your cheeks red.
View no boxing match.
Answer to no one rich, love none
of the poor, not a claim on yourself.
The letters gather hours.
White sheets want none of you.
Wouldn’t you reach for the sleep beyond sleep
but the pillows itch against your eyes
and we love rubbing them too much,
(“I can hear your eyes,” our daughter said.)
to the tears that you can take.
Wax Markets
What ideas we could be as opposed to liquids.
Grandfather, less than the blank of young afternoons.
Some pestilence bubbles where we hung the kerchiefs to dry.
Those turns took more than may be said.
Janitor fish birthing the tastiest discourse creekside has ever known.
I was one child, a stay against his bedsores.
Over coconut bowls, they named who’d fought whose wars.
Every strand of it was white, thick as needles.
We sat out the dawn together, on a ladder.
Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo works at the Department of Humanities of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. His poems recently appeared in Scarlet Dragonfly, Cold Moon, Storytellers Refrain, and The Field Guide Magazine.