“Meditations in A Fractured Archipelago” by Alyza Taguilaso
Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery from the Philippines. Her work is a finalist for the Rhysling Award. Her poems have also been shortlisted for contests like the Manchester Poetry Prize and Bridport Poetry Prize, and have been published in several publications, including Electric Literature, Crazy Horse, The Deadlands, Canthius, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Orbis Journal, Voice and Verse, and Luna Journal PH, among others. You may find her online via WordPress @alyzataguilastorm, Instagram @ventral, and Twitter @lalalalalalyza.
Author Foreword:
I wrote “Meditations in A Fractured Archipelago” sometime during the pandemic, lamenting the plight of medical professionals like myself who not only deal with the brunt of human suffering as we see in our patients, but also are plagued by burnout, and - specifically for a third-world nation like The Philippines - fake news and environmental degradation. I wrote this for people who continue to try to live despite unlivable conditions.
Today I receive boxes of things I have no time
to pick up myself. Red car jack, garbage
bags, a bucket of candy, a book of a friend
living halfway across the Pacific. At work, we get patients
who are shot, one tried to hang herself with a red ribbon
used to wrap a box of cake. Some get better, others don’t make it
past a few hours. Once, someone was brought in
pulseless after being suffocated
under heaps of flour. We are sorry
for your loss is usually cut short
by someone’s sobbing. Spouse, mother, sister, son,
friend. A few years ago, I thought the world ended
and I wouldn’t have to think of people and their patterns and
how exhausted this world makes me. Muscle, bone, sinew, vessel,
nerve. Scrub, scalpel, incise, rinse, repeat. Don’t forget
to take your home medications. Here I stand, awake
at 6 am, stretching my limbs as the earth remains
dry and parched under our feet. Bones sandwiched
between soil, rock, and oil. What treasures do these unnamed graves hold?
What calamities and plagues had they witnessed before their souls fossilized
with regret? In my country, when it rains, cities flood. We thrive
on monuments of mud and weeping. Mountain ranges
scalped bare by industry. Diwatas driven away
by drought. Profit for whose greater good? Greed grows
its exit wounds on almost all corners of this nation. Once I read
how a healed femur was the first sign of civilization; community.
But even that turned out to be fake news, manufactured
and spread by people desperate to get high on hope at the height
of the pandemic. Here is a broken bone. If you stop moving,
it might heal. Otherwise, it remains
fractured like the earth. Speaking
in tremors and quakes. Refusing
to answer to all names
we utter to appease it.
