Zola Gonzalez-MacaraMbon

Lunes on Home 

1
sharp orange pylons
like carapace of crab lunches
Sundays back home

2
suburban summer trees
called by any Other names -
malunggay, acacia, mansanitas

3
In blue-sky winters
I lie on the grass
imagining up-side-down seas

My mother in America emails instructions to the artist for a portrait of her mother,
now 85 and with Alzheimers

What I remember,
what I want her to remember …
what you can work with
are these:
youth, a lakeside town, routine mornings,
slick footpaths, the open lips
of a lake and muddy banks red
as fish gills, and stones
strangely shaped like …
like turtle heads, and a slow fog
feathering like threadbare scarves
around her hair. This young mother, mine,
has laundry angled on her hip,
has a toddling daughter – me -
who’s ahead of her, not very far, but far enough,
like now …
The girl should skip and sway
holding a *palo-palo – she promised to be helpful –
and a little pail of kittens
for drowning …
For color, don’t hold back
on the green-blue of the lake …
is all I see clearly now really,
but maybe not too clearly now
that I’m old too … If anything,
you can wash it all a blue-grey
since I am only working from fading
clarity … and I understand, your style
is realistic.
  
*a palo-palo is a paddle used for squeezing water out of laundry

Originally published by Literary Yard, April 2016.

Zola Gonzalez-MacaraMbon is a writer from the Philippines now living in Melbourne, Australia on scholarship as international student at Monash University School of Communications, Faculty of Arts.