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On Pork and Camellia

BY MARIEL ALONZO

University of the Philippines – Diliman, ’16
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Honorable Mention

as if by cutting the meat
you release its flowers –

frail parallel lines
leaping through

a cliff & graze
at sedimentation

crashing lightweight
on plastic chopping

boards – hymn of fracture
wings, quiet

pornography of marble
pushed into

a grinder –
whine & gristle
of gunmetal
& mechanic

song of pre-germination,
see the veins

of a hummingbird’s jaw
bulge, nectar sluicing

through its hollow –

behind the knees, soft
armpit & elbow

in pulse,
stretch marks betraying
ripeness

as each tendril claws
to form a nest,
peppered & salted

& palmed, laid
to rest in antiquity

tattooing prisons
on flesh,
a blooming

to baroque petals
of rain, unsalted, as it hits

the murk of flood, hissing,
how quick you took
me to heaven

and left me there.

Mariel Alonzo is an undergraduate student at the University of the Philippines – Diliman who used to study Mechanical Engineering. Some of her orphans have found refuge in journals such as Softblow, Toasted Cheese, Tower Journal, Santa Clara Review, blackmail press, and others. She is currently an intern blogger for Voices of Youth, UNICEF.

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