Geography class, 1960
by Patria Rivera

We roamed streets we first drew in Grade 4

learning the topography of monsoons.

La Loma,

our barrio, grew like a lichen on the foothills

of Sierra Madre Mountains. The Second World War

scorched its brown knolls into a suburb

of Manila’s illustrious dead, made even more

infamous by a huge cockpit, and pigs skewered

on bamboo spits, roasted for everyone’s celebrations.

Cocks and crows, pitogo trees and banyan roots

scuffed shadows on aureoled tombs, bloated urns,

crosses, sandstone angels, shrivelled maggots,

mausoleums, crypts piled on top of one another.

The scent of frangipani trailed humid evenings.

After the war, American soldiers decamped,

left us their Quonset huts, their taste for PX goods.

We did not bury our dead here.

They would’ve felt strange in this city of niches

and clapboard houses. The betting in the cockpit

would’ve drowned all grief:

Sa pula, sa puti—

the red and white cockfights crowing our luckless lives,

my aunts’ wailing—erased the small consolation

of a sky always blue.


© Patria Rivera