Steffi Tad-y

Wake

Steffi Tad-y

The sky has yet to fume & suffuse the nation with sweat.

This was where we were, tamarind & steady wind by the window,

two of us without a word, each with a pillow to the chest.

I patted your fifty-seven year old hair, more salt than silk,

more prickly than the past.

That Sunday, we did not talk about which ballplayer choked,

who was favoured to win, or some lining in the cloud.

We received —

no chide from the quiet but we heard the makings

of Mom preparing for the funeral. I haven’t

been here for awhile —

the summer trees this sharper air & what we had to tread.

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there were leaves

that lent its heft to the word rustle,

leaves that sounded like the rain,

leaves with so much green to give, the window

was a mirror, my father and I just sat there & cried.

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On Caring Steffi Tad-y

The country I left at twenty-two is called a temp agency of the planet.

I serve skills in the business of likeability & looking away.

Bow your head down. Smile. Baby, give me. That smile.

Book it.

For every customer who hurled, “Come on, where my Filipinos at?”

I wish I was a whip speaker.

Instead of freezing.

Instead of diabetes will not know I brought home a thousand timbits.

Instead of it’s all good, you can now insert your debit or credit card.

I ignored

this lonely shudder & the cost of maintaining a crescent weapon

constricting the jaw,

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straining the scalenes,

my shoulders and now, your shoulders.

I thought a poem if it earns

a pocketful of punchlines

would offer me a way out.

But I keep circling back to the shoulders, this poem is only a poem.

and it is about the shoulders.

Steffi Tad-y is a Filipina writer based in Vancouver, B.C. She writes poems about migration and everyday life in the diaspora. Her latest work was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2019. One of her current and present goals is to write a funny poem.

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