Patron Saints of Nothing

by Randy Ribay

It was a day of soil, sunlight, and smoke.

“I don’t get you.” Seth considers this. “Does anyone truly get anyone, Jay?”

How do you mourn someone you already let slip away? Are you even allowed to?

Truth is a hungry thing.

It was like he used all his compassion on strangers and ran out by the time he came home.

It’s a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it’s a narrower country than expected.

someone is accused without evidence, they are killed without mercy, then the police cover it up without regret.

The best classroom is the world

and where there is water, there will be Filipinos.

“It’s easy to romanticize a place when it’s far away,”

Sometimes I feel like growing up is slowly peeling back these layers of lies.

Like a tree in the wind, he will bend before the strength of my conviction.

A silent spirit who left behind a trail of fresh laundry, hot food, and clean dishes.

it is the kind of thing you need to experience for yourself to begin to understand. Like a full moon or a typhoon or love (so I am told).

Life persists.

Loneliness and noise. The American way.

And if you do not know your mother tongue, you cannot know your mother. And if you do not know your mother, you do not understand who you are.”

We are bound to family by blood, but there’s no guarantee any connection exists beyond that.

There are moments when sharing silence can be more meaningful than filling a space with empty chatter.

Who was I to step off the plane and demand anything of this place?

I’ve never thought about the guilt he carried across the ocean.

It’s the easy happiness of remembering better times.

English is a language that lives in the middle of the mouth, but Tagalog is more of an open throat song that dances between the tip of the tongue and the teeth.

This poem is a typhoon.

I wake early the next morning far before the alarm I set, because my brain hates me.

The first sign of a good reporter is an unhealthy obsession with the truth.”

“This is a good beach,” Tita Ines says. “No Australians.”

Surely the air your lungs first breathe matters. The language your ears first hear. The foods your nose first smells and your tongue first tastes. The soil you first crawl upon.

It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history.

there is no Tagalog word for someone who doesn’t eat meat.)

But maybe it’s time to dig it up. To let the sun hit the water. To let it flood.

All of the adults are failing us.

I expected the truth to illuminate, to resurrect. Not to ruin.

we’ll figure out how to live without him in ways where we will never be fully without him.

‘All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.’

remember every detail of this finite moment

I imagine both of us, patron saints of nothing.

If we are to be more than what we have been, there’s so much that we need to say. Salvation through honesty, I guess.

As I watch the world wake, I try to sense the shape of it now.