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When I Say Hello to the Oldest Apples
they tell me
a mountain is good for me. disowned by my papa,
I don’t reply—afraid of fathers, decades of dirt.
my cousins would sneer & slop me wet rice—
no mercy for a curse of daughters instead of sons.
a family tree scattered. spit in my tea.
maybe I am unloved because I want to deal
in the currency of ghosts—to traffic in such
precious things as broken rosaries, jars of ash.
when I ask for pardon as I trample knotted roots,
I nod to the spirit inside the wood: dwende, old
man of the mound who snatches bad children.
dirty one, you can’t walk here. I confess, I am
a dirty one. in dreams my claws rake the soil
of my mama’s garden as I search for fallen figs.
my brow ignores its lineage, tries to forget
centuries of grey-eyed Spaniards lurking
my veins, knocking the lumber of my heart.
when I say goodbye to manzanitas, boughs withering,
they tell me I’ll never forget them, that I’ll never
find fruit as familiar as their berries at their ripest.
I climb these trees, but in dark churches, hot wax
drips my knob-knees, sweat skimming the velvet
back of my neck. I can’t let go of what I think
is still mine—bloodlines flooding the slopes
of the Cordillera, silver in the hills—pine sap
casing my teeth as I say hello to the oldest apples.
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Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.
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Francisco de Goya, Duendecitos (Little Goblins), 1797–1799. Aquatint etching. Phoenix Art Museum.
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