DENNIS ANDREW S. AGUINALDO – Los Baños, Laguna, PH

We wasted baby powder on our young hair.
Thus made old, we spoke as grandparents to each other—

“Children, gather for a story…”
—yet too beside ourselves to arrive at story.

Three decades later, the powder’s on the top shelf,
the children we then imagined

now getting no funny ideas. Instead,
they glanced at my phone,

the children onscreen exhumed from ruined bedrooms,
their faces white, hair beaded with debris.

“What happened? Why carry them?”
Who at that moment wanted to speak

or stop, unable to arrive

at a whole. I washed my hands off the screen,
brought them to bed, gently

scratching their scalp clean of loose hair,
rubbing the shoulder, at once assured

of arm and back linked together. Soon, fast
enough asleep to count heartbeats.

Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo works merrily at the Department of Humanities of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Here, he helped institute courses on young adult narratives and creative nonfiction. His work appears online such as in the closing issues of Otoliths and Gnarled Oak.

Read more from Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo here.