Angela Gabrielle Fabunan: 3 Poems

The Medusa

I’m not as old as the painters would have it
I’m ageless in this age of monsters.

​I’m not as ugly as they’d have me be:
Unused to mirrors, I go out and hope
for the best, because my hair has minds 
of its own.

So that when I comb, I rake 
to a hushed echo, my hair embedding
the memory of what has passed.

​                                 And if I flirt
I make sure to tie my hair back 
in a tail and blink downward. 

​But flirting is unnecessary,
because when I glance at the sea
I still feel my lover’s shape, fair as day,
rising from the ocean depths, calling me
with a gaze black as night, to where he bathes.

And I call to him, tempt him with a bare shoulder,
and count to three, then turn back around . . .

It’s then that I wail and I glare
           stone upon stone upon stone
                      ​until I have made mountains.

​Rising and escalating
           leaving a trail of shooting stars
in a one-way streak, with a one-track mind, 
                      on my way to swallow the moon— 

                                            ​​So I can hear the screaming.

​The Penelope

​So sew already, knowing the outcome.
Tally your days like a prisoner.

​The home becomes a prison, you see,
when left this way: the body, the outpost.

​Each domestic task, like feeding the cats,
feeds on the worry and insomnia.

​What is a story of waiting but that
of keeping and holding on? The loom says

You may as well have cursed him
by expecting him to come home.

​And he will come home to you, 
but when? Everything has changed.

​You are not the woman he left, rarely
the woman he claimed. Are you still his

wife when there is no husband? 
But the loom says otherwise.

​The loom says: the winner is the one who crafts, 
the story, the victim, the hero,

​for whom the story is twisted 
as threads looped over and again.

The Daphne

I.

​I was meant to dance
as music transfigures my body
in everchanging degrees
A turn there, a twirl here.

​The sun and the moon 
my composers,
their beat constant.

​Every time I hear the wind’s shriek
I wave my hair to its incessant beat.

The moon looks me up and down
and I can feel music rising
day by day as its shape 
grows rounder and rounder— 

​There is compression in my lines,
There is heart to my movement,
There is soul in my limbs,

Even though I cannot take 
                                 a single step.

II.

You forced me to change from adjectives
[sweet, innocent, young, naïve] to verbs
[shrieking, piercing, shuddering, beating]

There I was, woman to tree, at the foot
of a goddess, keeping vigil, keeping myself.
Now, all that remains are her nouns
[myth, music, heaven, earth, boundary]

III.

The dew my breath, as I danced,
before it happened, when still I could
shake my unkempt hair in the wind,
its incessant beat, I was free— 
everywhere.

​When it happened, I wondered 
if it was ever my fault, because I 
looked so good, because I danced 
like the moon.

No matter.

It is I who holds the laurus nobilis now,
from me comes the glory, where I rest
atop the heads of all the heroes.

​Who is worthy of worship now, the god
of poetry, or that which crowns you?

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan lives in the Philippines but grew up in New York City. Her first book The Sea That Beckoned was published by Platypus Press in 2019, and her second book Young Enough to Play is forthcoming from UP Press in 2022. Her poems have been published in Asia, the UK, and the US. She lives back and forth in Manila, Olongapo City, and New York. One day, she might settle somewhere once she ends the search for a home. Her website is angelagabriellefabunan.com.​