the brown girl’s burden Rodlyn-Mae Banting
before we fucked he said he was scared he wouldn’t be able to match my intensity so I wedged my spine between the couch cushions so he’d know I stood for nothing. months later, when anxiety was no longer a prerequisite of lust he told me he was scared to be on the other side of my wrath, those ballistic fragments of magma1 the terrifying beauty of its continued eruption2 and so I swallowed all my molten rage until my lungs were instead an ash-ridden sky. when I was sixteen I paddled into the heart of Taal Lake, the surrounding fauna an areolan respite the weary horses standing guard to that open-mouthed beak lest she protest too much and watched as my sunglasses toppled off the side of the canoe. I shrieked and jumped in after them, my necessary shield against the potent sun my panic becoming one with the steaming water when I remembered that the lake was in fact also a volcano its dormancy a stroke of luck an arbitrary forgiveness. 124
