Luisa Balaban 100 Adele Evershed 117 Eric Abalajon

THE NEW CHEF by Eric Abalajon

A bandana keeps his long hair in place in the kitchen, beside him is a childhood best friend now a sous chef of sorts, frying red peanuts while waiting for the pork to become tender. The new chef is casual and frantic, they’re late but not behind schedule. When I started, he says, I didn’t know the business aspect. I just know how to cook. Many people think, including those in the community, that our food is cheap, which is nonsense since so much love and flavor goes into it. The final step in the adobo is adding vinegar and not touch it, just because, and it comes out magic. I’m working more, now in the car to make deliveries around Toronto in time for dinner, 14 to 16 hours, a long day for 10 percent profit but the happiness in handing over an order is something else, a few tasting Filipino food for the first time, seeing posts on social media with testimonies must mean this is special. By the end you already forgot the pandemic and this all started when he lost his office job.

TWO FACES OF LUGGAGE by Eric Abalajon

after Migration IV (2013) by Bert Monterona

We often imagine the movement but not the faces.

The largest are those by children,

while those by adults are indiscernible.

Half-open mouths, eyes, if any, avoiding contact.

Bodies can barely be seen as well,

the warm colors provides a pulse

to the stillness

as their hair merges with the background.

We often imagine the faces but not the movement.

MY GOD WEARS AN OBAMA T-SHIRT by Sophia Kriegel

In a photograph of my mother 8 months pregnant with Ella and I, her calves are a consistent thickness from her kneecaps, all the way past her shins. Her stomach is swollen beyond what I thought possible. I’m marveling at the way she, somehow, made space for so much life when it seemed there was none. I’m marveling at the evolution of it all. Not from monkeys or sinners who sunk their teeth into whatever they could find. I’m marveling at mothers. My mother. The slow, steady slither into humanity as one entity becomes another and another. Until the world is full and bursting with warm blood. The veins on her belly speak in hieroglyphics, obvious, eloquent, and unreadable. Scribbling lessons I might someday learn. If I hold the picture I can feel the weight of her body. I’m thinking about how much it must have hurt. How scared she must have been. Carrying that globe around, waiting.

I wouldn’t take a second of it back. She tells me.

I had, what one could call, a Christian summer. I spent a week of June with no cellphone in the woods, learning about God and wearing a t-shirt in the swimming pool (because girls weren’t allowed to show their torsos). That summer, Katherine told me I’d go to hell if I kept kissing boys behind the cabins after the counselors went to sleep. Kept falling asleep during church. Kept asking questions about everything.

I tried so hard to sing at the sermons, squealing something about glory. I wanted so badly to believe in whatever it was that warranted so much crying and confessing. I closed my eyes during prayer but didn’t say amen - it never felt right.

During a car ride to somewhere I can’t remember, I’m talking to my mother about God. She doesn’t wince when I tell her that I don’t see the sky that way. By that way, I mean consumed. By that way I mean all-seeing. I mean perched on my windowsill watching me peel my body from the bedsheets and helping me pick a shirt to wear. Or choosing to make my grandmother forget my birthday, and then my age, and then my name. Or listening to Ella sing in the school variety show and making the music skip. I mean, I don’t believe that Kate losing her phone on the shuttle to Disneyland is “just part of God’s plan, you know?” Just as I don’t believe that Melissa losing her friend to suicide is equally part of the same God’s said ‘plan’.

My mother says she believes in some kind of god. She doesn’t know its name yet but she doesn’t believe that this god is dictative in their distribution of wealth and poverty, success and tragedy, love and loss. My mother’s God is a cornucopia of resources, a starting point that gifts one tools to live a meaningful life - tools with which we have the power to use to construct our own stories driven by our own choices.

I Google the definition of the term ‘god.’

The word means as follows: the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.

My mother shows me a photograph from my birth. There is blood but she is smiling. I try my best to remember what it must have been like to grow inside of somebody else. A puzzle of flesh pieces, the cultivation of my body and then my soul, accumulating inside of a small universe. My mother’s stomach, a world within itself, the home of being. She is the starting point.

My mother finds a note in my backpack that I’ve written to Ryan Jones professing my undying love. I plan to give it to him at the library after we finish in the fourth grade science lab because I believe in love the way all children believe in things that are bigger than them. Things they can feel in their bones. She tells me not to hand him the confession. There are better ways to go about this kind of thing. I don’t listen. Ryan returns the letter, wordless and giggling. Somehow, she always knows.

My mother tells me to pay attention to the television. She flips to the news. “Listen. That is the only way to figure out what you believe.” My mother is on the couch, eating a bagel sandwich and wearing an Obama t-shirt, still, I learn individually. I create opinions from conversation and the cultivation of knowledge rather than regurgitating the views of the authoritative figures that surround me. She doesn’t tell me what to think, just to do so acutely.

My mother has a box in her closet that I have to stand on a chair to reach. Inside, I find the two elves that visit us every Christmas. They play tricks on Ella and I when we’re asleep, leave us candy, and scribble notes in scratchy lettering. In this box, they are less human. In this box, they are just dolls. I shove the cardboard back on the shelf. I don’t tell my mother that I know of her secret. Instead, when December arrives and Ella and I receive a letter from Sparkle and Glitter, documenting their year at Santa’s workshop, I smile and believe. She breathes magic into things and then, there is life.

My mother, the creator of my universe. My mother, the source of moral authority. My mother, the supreme being.

And if God is all of these things, then I think my mother might be God. I think my mother is my God. I think the more times I say it out loud the truer it becomes. The more words I type in this essay, the more it begins to make sense - religion, I mean. God. How my mother was my God when I left her body. And how my mother is my God when I feel myself beginning to leave my own. I’m scared that one day I will tell her that I hate her, and mean it. I’m scared

that I will forget to call her on her birthday and I will grow tired and busy and swollen with my own children. I will forget about Ryan Jones and the elves and the Obama t-shirt. I’m scared of losing her, and with that, the sanctity of this realization.

Maybe then, I’ll find myself crouched in the pews of some church. Maybe then, I’ll glue my knees to the ground in search of guidance. But, for now, she is here.

Religion, faith, life, is not about belief. It is about idolization. It’s about admiration. It’s about protection. It’s singing in a school variety show and the music skipping and your mother humming the tune so that you can keep going. It isn’t praying for guidance in the dark, rather, knocking on your mother’s bedroom door at 3 in the morning to ask if you can cry in her lap about a boy. About leaving for college. About life.

Why must I seek answers elsewhere when my mother knows everything? Why search for an intangible god when my mother sleeps down the hall, creating my universe, guiding me through it?