Three Poems by John Brixter Tino
John Brixter Tino
John Brixter Tino is a son of a fisherman and is a person with disabilities. He was raised in Perez, Quezon, Philippines. He currently serves as a part-time instructor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies. He was a recipient of the National Youth Achievement Award for Literary Arts conferred by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. His poems and essays have received recognition from the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. His works have been published in various journals and publications, including UP Lirip Journal, Philippine Collegian, Mekong Review, Philippine Star, and TLDTD Journal, among other zines and anthologies.
Form
Date of incident: ___________ Location: the kitchen chair knew first
□ Yes □ No Were you aware of your body
The spoon in the drawer trembled. The wallpaper memorized the angle of his hands.
I am reporting that the doorknob turned at 11:47 pm & held the shape of fingers long after
□ Check all that apply:
Description of events in your own words:
The mattress spring a witness compressed into the shape of what happened
I could hear the faucet dripping. It was keeping a record.
The mirror held two figures & would hold them years past
Signature: ________________
The carpet fibers bent in the direction he left. They have yet to rise.
Physical evidence (see attached):
a pillowcase (stained)
a clock (stopped at)
a glass of water (still full / still full / still full)
The objects do what I cannot: they remain precise.
They do what I was never allowed: they tell it the same way twice.
□ I certify the above is accurate.
□ The house certifies. The house was always awake.
A Soft Place to Begin Again
Stand the chair against the wall where it watched. I have given it too many
evenings. The mirror holds what I cannot retrieve— a face rearranging itself
into stillness, the particular silence of skin remembering pressure it never
invited. Stand in the kitchen. The knife rack gleams. The glasses lined up on
their shelf know the sound of a palm pressed flat against a mouth. I carried my
body through rooms the way one carries a borrowed instrument, afraid of damage,
afraid of the owner returning to check for new scratches. The sheets remember
folding. The doorknob remembers the grip— how a hand can mean lock, how
a lock can mean nothing. I tell the lamp: you were there. I tell the floorboards: you
held the weight of two when only one was willing. Stand at the window. The glass has
kept its version. Fingerprints no cloth has touched. The curtain pulled shut so hard
the rod bent. Objects do what I cannot— they stay in the room. They absorb. They
retain. The wooden spoon in its jar, the towel on its hook, the clock still counting what
it measured then. I have asked the walls for testimony. They offer only their cool
plaster, their refusal to crack under what they witnessed. Stand here. In the body that
is finally mine again. Even the floor feels different when you choose where to place
your feet.
The Long Work of Staying Here
On the nightstand, a glass of water holds the ceiling light like a small arrested sun.
The hairbrush on the dresser keeps its tally of lost strands. She was seventeen when
the chair learned to mean a different thing. The wooden arm worn smooth where
her fingers gripped and gripped. A towel remembers what soap tried to undo.
The mirror practiced holding her face steady while the rest of her dissolved into
wallpaper roses. Objects are loyal in their way. The mattress spring that sang its one
note through the dark still sings it, years from here. She moves through kitchens
now where the knives lie quiet in their block, where the clock’s second hand sweeps
the hour clean, sweeps it clean. A doorknob she once watched for the slow rotation
gleams in another house, turned by other hands. The body too is an object. It learned
to leave itself the way a dress learns the floor, pooling into absence. Her coffee cup
rings the table with pale circles. Evidence of ordinary mornings. Proof she stayed.
The spoon stirs. The faucet drips. The floorboards under her feet creak their
recognition. They know her weight by now. How she carries it. How the lamp finds
her reading at 3 a.m., the pages turning like someone learning to breathe again.