Abstract Trio by Paul Klee / Artvee

Listen:

What happens when fantastic
becomes fan-fucking-tastic
was not something I considered
until I tried to learn Tagalog,
the f-bomb in this case an infix,
element that sounds vaguely criminal
but is old as fuck itself.
Motherfucker on the other hand’s
much younger — you low-down mother-
fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to
the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918
can put a gun in our hands
but who can take it out? Black soldiers
like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines
twenty years earlier & before that saved
Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill.
Before the Spaniards they fought Indians:
Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced
to forget numu tekwapu the Comanche
for Comanche — in English-only schools.
Tagalog agglutinates. Stems
glom tense & tone
like coconut flakes on rice balls.
Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat
by subsuming um (in English a sound
of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish
fibrillates to mamamatay —
one day you will die.
The infix marks the shift: ma,
as though to go from death
the infinitive to death as future tense
one need only bury their mother.

Chris Santiago

Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, published by Milkweed Editions and selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in POETRY, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series, Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, and The Slowdown, hosted by Ada Límon. A Kundiman Fellow, a Mellon/ACLS Fellow, and a 2021–2022 Loft Mentor in Poetry, he teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.