and you let it be I gained too much
guilt bloomed inside me closing
gate apartment surrounded
by your mother’s dead plants
you devoured my lips as if I’m leaving
too soon you left me promise
as aftertaste Dangwa rain made me
binge rotting petals in sidewalks
of eponymous streets we named together
Too close enough to meet
Too blue enough to distance
what unearths gutters around cities
never supposed to be ours: History
budding in tenements their essence
reminder once we intimate rivers
buried middens of yesterday’s
deboned memories: I knew your name
before air ceases you are what leaves
bouquet carcasses floating between us
dreamlike my slipper in that flash flood
where lola told me to piss in to purify
murky reservoirs so it remembers
human contact was not irrigation:
To change current monsoon forecasts
ancestral rice fields sold to envy
finally grow abundant water
drownèd blessings burning
flowers burgeon unexpected spaces:
The wet market
The dinner table
The hospital bed
The shared gravestone
The end of rice fields
The apartment where
The santó germinate
The durabox with
The hollows in our chest:
The florescence
of light consoling
us to return
starving souls. ∎
Author’s Note: The title is a rendition of the first line from Wilfrido Nolledo’s But for the Lovers.
Euri Carreon was born in Malolos. He studies Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
Featured image: “Lotus, Wide Open” by Dain L. Tasker
The Dilettante 
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