Taifinakpo’
By Pep Borja
Unearthing spear tips
Tiger shark teeth
And skulls on the beam
Of my father’s long dream
Tagachang
Before the sun came up
There were footprints in the sand
Sharpened femur
and rows of teeth
Alive in the king tide
We said we’d always catch.
Manny cut through the waves
At Boat like a swordfish
But he was swallowing salt water
In glass pipe visions polluting
All beaches we fished
When we were just kids
He ended up crashing his corolla
Into the gates of a sober night
And all I remember is how
He showed me how
To set nets and tie hooks
On all the stories we told
Of the future, unafraid
Of the waves
Crashing on the shore
When we had no way of knowing
We were padding into an ocean
With no stars to guide us.
Pågu
The riptide came
For Uncle Carlos in December
He went cold turkey before Christmas
And he started going to church
But I didn’t see him drifting
The channels, keeping quiet
Behind smiles
And the blue of a deep
Only scavengers could reach.
When he didn’t return to shore
There were no sorrows
Or mysteries
No techa to cry Maria
And in the nine days after his wake
The songs of the pilot whales
Beached themselves
All along the coast.
Tokcha
I heard an ocean screaming in the distance
But the grass between the headstones
Stayed windless
In lonely patches the crosses avoided
The old man died with a scent of dementia
Grinning at my grandmother
So the daughters chanted
And the suruhåna brought her back
My father
Standing over her bones
With a shovel
Recalling her
In the grooves of the skull
The strands of her hair
Brown like she were alive
As he wraps them
Around his finger.
Pep Borja is a CHamoru writer and author of Dry Nights, a collection of poetry published by the University of Guam Press. He has had his work published by University of Hawaii Press, Achiote Press, The Kartika Review, The Yellow Medicine Review, and the University of Guam’s literary journal, Storyboard. He has lived in Guam all his life.
