Inheritance

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a.k.a. St. Louis World's Fair, featured a Filipino “living exhibit:” “a 47-acre site that for seven months […] became home to more than 1,000 Filipinos from at least ten different ethnic groups. The biggest crowd-drawers were the so-called primitive tribes—especially the Igorots, whose appeal lay in their custom of eating dogs.” —Greg Allen, NPR, 2004

Ancestral blood. Anxious tics in my right eye. Anthem I never learned. Broad forehead. Callused hands, or a preference for work that grows them. Colonial rapist blood. Dual tongues. Dueling tongues. Dogtown. Errata. Fried fish slickening a paper towel. Feeling of general uneasiness. Ghosts in my peripheral. Hindi sapat ang isang wika lamang. Igorots dining on dogs. Juice from the betel nut staining my teeth. Kuya’s ESL classes: The hardest part was learning to soften the tongue. Lexicon of slurs. Little brown brothers. Matigas ang ulo. Mother I love most from a distance. Mexico of Asia. Nation misplaced. Offensive smells from the kitchen. Pinoy nose. Primitive people. Quivering yolks of fried eggs over corned beef rice. Quiet daughter. Rain scattered from an umbrella snapped shut. Sister craving fried Spam and soggy white bread. Sister sunning her brown legs on the deck. Strategic location. Tactical advantage. Tilled rice field. Translator since birth. Uncitizen. Very amiable. War brothers. Willing people. Xenophilic gaze. Year of the dog. Year of the Igorot. Yes-Man. Zoo of the captured. Zoo the carnivorous. Zoo of manifest destiny.

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Maria Isabelle Carlos is a writer and editor from Missouri. Her work—which has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets.Org, Passages North, Pleiades, Hyphen Magazine, and elsewhere—has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. She has received support from Vanderbilt University, UNC-Chapel Hill, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Tin House, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Maria is the assistant nonfiction editor of Zone 3 and the editor of Inch from Bull City Press. Read more at www.mariaisabellecarlos.com.