and when the soft tendrils turn to leaves the villagers select
the softest to eat with pebbled rice and pig’s blood, further north
the world’s oldest tattooist resides, a 106-year-old Kalinga woman
with bamboo and thorn, and sooted ink in her veins
we too were planted on the foothills where blue gums threaded
the escarpment called mother mountain, cradling a slice
of land before it reaches the sea; and it is a city of leaving,
of sister-friends pulling taproot from metatarsal, scraping lichen
from our feet, plucking filaments from our nails
lest we betray our luminescence, lest our electric pulse betray
our chosen dirt; the raucous sea-level cities, our expansion
across the topsoil, our fronds fecund with learning and lust
sister-friends seeding along the seaboard, though sometimes
i imagine myself, one hundred and six, tapping mountain soot
into skin.
*kamote: sweet potato
