by Miguel García

Culture in this city is one cubist study—

An old military fort in Kowloon was a stack of shoeboxes
………. contorting bodies
………. into a foot bind.
A young woman could almost dream a circus ring,
………. if not for the scent
………. of opium parlours
& triad rings that pigeonhole dreams into obscurity.

& there is Victoria Park, green lawn grass, alone
………. in the middle of concrete,
………. steel, & democracy.
But on Sundays, sea grass mats patch colour & Tupperware
………. cradling chicken drum-
………. sticks & pancit canton—
yayas have come from the Philippines to colonise the Queen.

Study cubism & wander into the culture of this city—

Building blocks, our history, they fall as crusts from a cloud
………. clumping shrapnel;
………. they form an image
of our city, paint sinking its way into the canvas beneath
………. woven sea grass mats sat
………. by a sea of women have
ass cracks without passports, they don’t care about borders.

& while the women sit in their banig carpets magic singing
………. karaoke to bring them
………. home, stalls selling
chow mein smelled cigarette & sweat shirt-stained cheap beer,
………. they are university
………. students burning
in their tongues, the fire in their wok has street food & freedom.

Ice cubes are dancing dervishes in this floating city—

Lemon ice tea is a glass walled city, brown molecules inside
………. clump together
………. to form a coup.
Yaya serves a pitcher to her kids wearing black T-shirts,
………. face masks, & lots
………. of sunscreen, because
Yaya insisted: independence is a long hot summer day.

The city tonight is owl-eyed, an office cubicle scented coffee
………. signals the start of another
………. time zone’s trading day,
Yaya is in bed asleep on her banig, her room is a stateless
………. shoebox without that
………. passport, her kids are out
on the streets spraying square walls into cubist paintings.

Tear gas tears sea grass mats into a city of fragmented
windows, fractured bones, & foot binding.

The city is a woman in a cubist study.

Author’s Notes:

1. This is an ekphrastic poem based on the cubist painting, La ville No. 2, by Robert Delaunay, 1910.
2. Banig is a Filipino woven mat made of buri or sea grass.
3. Pancit canton is an egg noodle dish popular in the Philippines, especially during parties and social gatherings.
4. 4. Yaya is nanny, a term popular in the Philippines and in the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain.

Miguel García is a PhD student in decision neuroscience at the University of Zurich. He is largely interested in how perception shapes and affects our decisions. From the sizes of food items to how we mentally represent numbers in high-stakes financial decisions, he attempts to uncover the neural mechanisms involved in these processes. He also writes poems, both in English and Cebuano. And he performs spoken word and compete in poetry slams in London and Zurich. How we perceive ourselves in the context of the environments and spaces around us fundamentally informs the poetry he writes and performs.