A Poem by B.B.P. Hosmillo
Author: Poetry Editor
October 11, 2017
This week, a poem by B.B.P. Hosmillo.
Before That Thing You Didn’t Want to Speak
Look at it again: the shaved dog in the immobile palm of deep breathing
without fire exit. As though behind bars.
As though seconds are for extinction. Say hmn.
Say human.
Say Subhuman. That seismic circuit.
Never new
but impeccably unprecedented,
always
novel, more vulnerable than a mortal wound.
Didn’t you know hurt is sometimes felt
only in the future?
Didn’t you know
you brought it here
since you wanted to love in private.
That will not be discussed.
An entertaining earthquake is near
and you have to
skin an animal and eat it, too.
Seems the point: the private is a survivable bleeding.
No foreplay is good enough to explore your name.
Go ahead, come
in the dark and try to see your face and remember that’s all you have.
——
B.B.P. HOSMILLO is a queer and anti-colonial writer from the Philippines. He is the author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên and Hải Yến. He is co-editing Indigenous Futurisms & Imagining the Decolonial with Raquel Salas Rivera and Sarah Clark. Anthologized in Bettering American Poetry 2015, his work is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Construction. He is the founder of Queer Southeast Asia: a literary journal of transgressive art, a poetry reader for BOAAT Journal, and occasionally a guest poetry editor for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He is currently the Associate Expert at the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the auspices of UNESCO in Jeonju, South Korea.
