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by Kabel Mishka Ligot At nights my fingers do the travelling, scroll whole avenues on the flat light that falls on my face from time to time like a stubborn tear. How can I sleep when those I love are dancing in the crumbling city? Set me right between them, put my body back in flip-flops on the dirtied floors, steep my skin in clouds wafting from street-food carts. The names of roads all blur in the mind’s atlas, but never the smell of late-night noodles, whole pan de sal broken open to share. Here my body feels riddled with footnotes, small gaps people carefully prod like stigmata, peer through like peepholes into a rented room with the softest bed. In the mornings I skim through these straighter streets, slumber-softened bone hissing at the misplaced sun. For now, let everything come to me in thirty-second mouthfuls, blue-hued pictures of friends of friends I’ve yet to meet. Don’t let your sorrow run out until I taste it. Save me every minor secret you’d otherwise forget. Bring all your weightiest joys. When we meet, you won’t need to explain anything.  photo by Danny Montemayor Kabel Mishka Ligot works behind the desk at a high school library. Mishka holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has work published or forthcoming in RHINO, Waxwing, The Margins, The Southeast Review and other journals. He is a Tin House and Indiana University Writers’ Conference alumnus. Born and raised around Metro Manila in the Philippines, Mishka currently lives in the Midwest. kabelmishka.com Comments are closed.
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