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Rodlyn-Mae Banting

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Jason Magabo Perez

Jason Magabo Perez

the brown girl’s burden

Rodlyn-Mae Banting

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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.

I want to love my country with the same ardency with which I love white men my disappearance somehow a simultaneous becoming my willful folding a pledged allegiance to the bluest eye I know will never protect me will always think me savage. I want to fear its loss so much that I will always swim on after it, sifting beneath the lightning sky, even if it leads to the bottom of a crater that is also a bowl waiting to consume me.

__________________ 1 Description in a CNN report after 2020 Taal volcanic eruption 2 DW News Germany broadcast of 2020 Taal volcanic eruption

Severance Package

Rodlyn-Mae Banting

Content Warning: Graphic imagery relating to genitalia

“If a crew member loses his penis, he’s paid $20,900. If a worker dies: $50,000. The maximum payout, for permanent disability, is capped at $60,000.” —The California Sunday Magazine on the policies for Filipino seafarers aboard Carnival Cruise Line ships.

When I first met your best friend, she turned to me and said, “I can already tell how good you are for him,” as if I was the antidote to your sadness, a manic pixie Nightingale expedited from a hospital overseas, ready to embrace the carnage.

Months later: on our last night, when your father asked to speak with me, your sorrow still damp on my blouse, I rose to greet a sullen jury but instead he grabbed me by the elbows and said, “Thank you for taking care of him.”

So later, when we sat in the garden and found a bird on the ground dead and crawling with ants, I could not tell if my instinct was to weep or wipe its ass, could not tell if it was my duty to clean up its blue-green mess or if this made me a carcass too:

Disposable like my forefathers who joined the U.S. Navy and beamed just to learn that they were busboys. Like my brothers who boarded the cruise ships and hustled below the docks because their severed dicks were worth more than a month’s pay.

Where is my metaphorical dick? Does it make me a real one if I choose not to only take care of you? Does it make me a sinner to redirect the blood flow to the beating of my own heart?

And even later: when you waved me off at security, standing at the shore of my devotion, the lines drawn so sharply I could taste the sea in my mouth, I could not tell if it was you or I who sighed in relief knowing that love does not come with a severance package.

Rodlyn-Mae Banting is a Filipina writer born and raised in New York. Her work has appeared in Z Publishing’s Maryland’s Best Emerging Poets (2018), America’s Best Emerging Poets (2018), The Baltimore Sun, and Friktion Magasin. She is currently a master’s candidate in UW-Madison’s Gender & Women’s Studies Program. Her hobbies include baking, reading, and cuddling with her cats. You can follow her on Twitter at @fmnstmelodrama.

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