by Alfonso Manalastas

Look,

if you think about it,
there is nothing
magical about the way
entire cities unravel
beneath our feet,
it’s just the subway!
Everything we hold dear
were once desired and once
forsaken, like the charred skin
of a Peking duck emerging
from its porcelain nest—an odd
foreign thing I can only
yearn from a distance.
Walking back to my hotel room,
my life is the backdrop
of a Wong Kar-wai film
soundtracked by the synth
of traffic light music, roads
wet with sutures of onlookers
in a place where everything
blooms: the KFC
around the corner unfurls
my tongue with a basket
of chicken, the most
American of this trip so far,
which is to say,
the most Filipino.
In an attempt to find
the self, one must
at some point depart
from the famed Tsim Sha Tsui
for the occasional barter:
souvenirs from Mong Kok,
a pint from Lan Kwai Fong,
and if you’re lucky,
souvenirs swimming
at the bottom of a pint
from Lan Kwai Fong.
On my fourth day navigating
the city, I’ve begun
to appreciate food
whose many names I cannot
pronounce, a weather
I never seem to have
enough clothes for,
and a bustling subway
unlike anything back home.
Even underground, when this
near-perfect city breathes,
it still hums a different tune
coalescing Cantonese words
echoing from a voice box,
the whoosh
of a speeding train,
and wait—uproar?

Alfonso Manalastas is an op-ed contributing writer, a poet, and a spoken word artist from the Philippines. He was accepted as a poetry fellow for two national writers’ workshops, and has spoken in two TEDx events (Cebu and Davao City). His op-ed articles can be found in Rappler, Scout, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, while his poems have appeared in several journals including Likhaan: the Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature. He can be found on Twitter.