I told you before that Angket’s rage was the color red
but I was wrong. Her anger is yellow as yolk, bright
as the sun. What twinkles is her longing, what’s red is
her hand reaching forth. For all the colors you cannot see,
I got this one wrong. I remembered because sometimes
the itch is unforgivable and I yearn and I scratch at it,
I scratch at the feeling of wanting to be small again,
when smallness was all my own and you were with me
when the family were our great stewards, giants of the
home. I miss everyone. I miss Angket and her red hand.
I miss you in your green hat. I miss our days of color
that we outgrew, it was all ours. And it was all ours to lose.
Kired Quidangen (she/they) is an Itneg-Ilocano writer from the hinterlands of the Ilocos Country. They work in poetry, translation, and visual art drawing from their ancestry of historical placelessness and their coming to age with the parental supervision of the internet in the time of intensifying environmental disasters. Their ongoing projects include navigations of the intersections of poetry and visual art as collaborative and collocate mediums, and the intricacies of mother tongue translations. Their work has appeared in Pa-Liwanag (To the Light), a chapbook of Filipino poetry and prose from Tilted Axis Press.
Painting by. Joseph Marius Jean Avy
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