Here: the story about salt and the sea.
A child by the shore traces the edge
of the water with his finger. He takes
a handful and puts it in his mouth.
And for the first time he discovers
the taste of salt water, how different from
how he had imagined it on TV: Sweet
as a jell-o his mother made for his birthday.
He wanted to cut the clear blue waters
into pieces and put them in his mouth.
But now the salt begins to dry in his lips.
He washes it away with water
but the salt still stings his tongue.
‘It will only hurt a bit, baby,’ his mother says,
looking over her Aviators,
as she shuffles her playing cards.
The child stares at the horizon,
looking like a squinting eye, as the wind
sends sea sprays in his face.
Twenty years on, now half a man,
he experiences his first taste of love—
how painfully it hurt the first time,
and how much more it did the second.
His mother kept warning him about this man:
‘I raised you better than this, honey.’
But he keeps on coming back, repeating
the same mistakes over and over.
‘I love him more than he loves me.’
And that was the end of it. He knew,
when he said it, he was done for.
He closes his eyes, traces the lines
of his lips and wonders how swollen
it had become. Was it cum in his mouth?
Or God finally betraying his body?
For a moment, the sea reels back to him:
How the horizon was an eye looking back
at him, his mother with her playing cards,
and how the salt in his lips
had once hurt for a bit.
Art by Karl Davin Hui
BRYLLE B. TABORA IS A GRADUATE OF B.S. BIOLOGY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS. HE WAS A WRITING FELLOW FOR POETRY IN THE UST SUMMER CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP (2014) AND THE 52ND SILLIMAN UNIVERSITY NATIONAL WRITERS WORKSHOP (2013), AND A FELLOW FOR FICTION AT THE 12TH IYAS CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP (2012) IN BACOLOD CITY. HIS POEMS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN THE PHILIPPINES GRAPHIC, HEIGHTS, MONTAGE, SILLIMAN JOURNAL, AND THE QUARTERLY LITERARY REVIEW SINGAPORE, AMONG OTHERS.
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