Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Naila Moreira
Instructions to Travelers from the Third World
Before you cross the border, you must learn how to use your passport,
the sine qua non of any voyage. Guard it as your life; you must not lose your passport.
Your photo may adorn it, but it really is the property of your crumbling republic,
as you are. It is a crime to alter or reproduce your passport.
Peculiar to you as your shadow, your fingerprint, your double helix,
it is neither carte blanche nor diary of hopes. Don’t abuse your passport.
You dream of glimpsing snow, cathedrals, fist-sized diamonds plundered from your land…
First you must queue for hours in the sun, wait for the consul to peruse your passport.
When he slams down his crimson stamp like a gavel, and you walk home,
dusting off your shame, how easy it will be to accuse your passport!
(But it is guiltless as a tortured root that causes you to trip and break a bone.
Blame instead your fellow terrorists and refugees, and excuse your passport.)
Think you can sneak by without a visa, feign ignorance, charm the immigration officer
with your strange locution? Your scheme will boomerang once he views your passport.
Your name, the theorems you’ve proved, your cancer cure are of no consequence.
Its pages blighted fields, your passport is your world. You cannot choose your passport.
Boondocks
According to the 2002 Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year, the Philippines has the fourth-largest population of English speakers in the world, ranking after the United States, India, and the United Kingdom.
To show our appreciation for your gift
of language, we’d like to offer you one word
of our own, bundók, which means “mountain.”
It may not slide as smoothly off your tongue
as the French montagne, but we hope nonetheless
your lexicon can accommodate this term,
which has been blessed by the goddess who scatters
ginger along Makiling’s slopes. Keep it
as a souvenir of the times we fought side by side
when the Japanese hunted us down
in the Cordilleras, and let your poets repeat it
when they recount those still-unnamed battles
in their slim volumes. Remember to say the word
out loud, for luck, before you leave our shores,
your frigates full of timber, siblings, gold.
Present Values
From their towers
little gods wage wars,
deploying their red currencies.
“Mine.”
“Yours.”
Couched in possession,
each retort enlarges a world,
constricts another’s.
Still no sign
of wreckage, save the wind,
which rumors new casualties
with each cold stab.
Above, constellations
of insomniac windows:
Arbitrageur, hand poised
to level his skewed
balance; Speculator,
eyes wholly invested in the future.
O Earth, O Mortmain,
of what use is it to place our trust
in the argentine stars,
when it is the dark
that will endure,
minting more and more of itself
like the Emperor’s new coins?
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors of the following journals in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:
Michigan Quarterly Review: “Boondocks”
Pleiades: “Instructions to Travelers from the Third World”
Born and raised in the Philippines, José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes is the author of the chapbook Present Values (Backbone Press, 2018), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His poems have previously appeared in various Philippine and U.S. journals and anthologies.