by Michellan Sarile-Alagao

Joel Alagao, *Disentanglement,* pencil and paper, 31 x 31 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

mekararuanan

Michellan Sarile-Alagao| July 2024 | Issue 35

mekararuanan¹

Hasta que el pueblo las canta, Sikaw kurug a maya
las coplas, coplas no son, kataw ta gabbayan na
y cuando las canta el pueblo, ariammu itun
ya nadie sabe el autor. a ammum tu aru y lalung.

“La Copla” An Ibanag proverb
Manual Machado

I. itte/uno

My great-grandmother had been dead for years when my soul fled. I searched days for my soul, going back and forth between our old haunts, the places we hid in, cried at, crawled into. When I finally found my soul I asked, can you return? Let us share a meal, walk in step, inhale the same breath and be the wholeness of sleep, of dream. She said she wanted to come back more than anything, that she, too, missed sleep and food and me. But she could not, not until we did the mangagaggako² then she sadly slipped away.

II. dua/dos

When I was little, my great-grandmother sometimes murmured macasta while touching the side of my face or snapped mataqui na ulu while rubbing her temple when I answered back at her. I was a pretty little nuisance, a beautiful headache, her rebel girl with the apple-cut hair who grew up writing poetry in English.

“Lola, please teach me Ibanag,” I pleaded, when I was older and it was much too late to learn. She raised me but never taught me how to say magandang umaga po or kain na in her first language. Instead, she spoke to me in her formal, former grade school teacher English and taught me how to say A is for apple (AH-puhl).

III. tallu/tres

I could have been a verzista, performing the mangagaggako through songs, proverbs, and poetry. I believed I could summon the right words if I knew the language of my blood. So I bought an Ibanag-English dictionary only to find that of the 3,000-plus words it contained, over 1,800 were derived from Spanish. Suddenly I understood why the verzos³ my great-grandmother knew by heart sounded so much like coplas and why I grew up counting one, two, three, uno, dos, tres.

IV. appa/cuatro

I wrote this poem for my soul. I hope it reaches her soon. I grow tired of half-hopes and half-dreams. I live half-awake, write in fragments, and wait for her to return.

yena mammanu
flying at dusk
your baggui imagined
the manifestation
ni espiritu
stripped
to its core
which arm
would
reach out stretch down
reach up press firmly
stretch towards palm on davvun
the first bitun de la noche holding your weight
would you bend
would you try
not to
break

¹ A state wherein the soul has fled the body after some massive shock.

² Ritual inviting the soul back to its body.

³ Ibanag version of a bard or minstrel.

Michellan Sarile-Alagao is an editor, educator, writer, wife, and mother. She was a poetry fellow at the 2023 international Roots. Wounds. Words Annual Writers’ Retreat for BIPOC writers, and in 2022 attended Corporeal Writing’s Geo Eros: Metaphorizing Place in Nonfiction and Memoir webinar. She was one of the Graphic Salute awardees at the 2024 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards in the Philippines. She has a BSc. in Criminology and Psychology from the London Metropolitan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from DLSU-Manila. Her poems have been published in various anthologies and magazines. She has written a poetry collection, After the Sunstone (2016); a poetry chapbook, Maps of Tenderness (2018); a verse-novella, Black (2020); a picture book in rhyming verse for children, The Sad Cat (2022); and a flash fiction chapbook, Elena and Other Stories (2023).