my father teaches me the names of near-forgotten wars

& starts from the beginning: how a child can wander,
chasing after some wide-eyed dog or an innocent straying
light before a sleight of hand slips an innocent soldier’s
toy & disappears the child; how to force the eyes to swallow
the bamboo ash & smoke, leave the softly-lit rice fields & run
to an unfixed distance; how a man needs to shelter a wife
after leering eyes ravage her; how a brown girl can disguise
the sway of her hips & look men in the eyes, trick them
into another sleight; how to forget the rest,
the many things you must leave in the wake of cinder ash
& human smoke, the many sounds you must escape—the mothers
wading in the rice fields, permanently hunched, the march
of a solitary child pushing over the edge of a building—the many,
many names you learn never to say aloud, whose ghosts always wander
home, wandering for another innocent stray of light; how, like moths,
ghosts & papers are drawn to things that can destroy them: fire
& the remnant left for another quiet diaspora; how a daughter
must learn to craft steel to witness their father in the dead
nights when he begs for the return of names he told her
not to utter; how to remember the forgotten, all that happened
before—the coconuts before they fell to an onslaught of hungry
soldiers, the laughter trapped in the bamboo huts & the sway
of singing rice fields, the smile of a child before he goes
on that fateful wandering from home.

Yvanna Vien Tica is a Christian Filipino writer who lives in Manila. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Faith Review and a Genre Editor for Polyphony Lit. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, Kenyon Review, the Young Playwrights Festival, and has appeared in the Filipino-American Chicago newspaper MEGAscene, The Rising Phoenix Review, and EX/POST Magazine, among others.