In another life, I would wear helmets every day. My mother watches Twilight so she can fall asleep. When my sister dreams of vegetables, they are already diced. My father watches cobra hunters on TV when he can’t fall asleep. They pull up floorboards. They kick empty tires. Tomorrow, my father will have open heart surgery. Tonight, I hear my neighbors that I have never seen. They could be playing snakes and ladders. They could be surgeons or dice makers. Have you ever lived inside of a die? The dice maker who was once a jeweler asks the mirror. The jeweler who was once a dice maker says yes.
Rigel Portales is a twenty-year-old Filipino poet afraid of disappearing. Fortunately, his works have appeared/are soon to appear on Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and Cha with a poetry chapbook, DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN, forthcoming from FlowerSong Press in the US. He’s currently poetry editor at the Malate Literary Folio. You can find him on his Twitter account @rijwrites where he writes to preserve and preserves to write.