Self-Portrait as Friend, or Variations of a Hallmark Greeting Card
Alton Melvar M Dapanas
for Michelle Perez
How long has it been, Our Lady of Carefree, Queen Mother of Tequila, Slayer of Misogyny? The years: our midnight walks in search of a bowl of humba at Cogon market or lauya at Capistrano street, your nonstop spitting of swearwords like funny tastes on the tongue, my incessant puking of brandy, even the short-lived “friends” we thought would be with us through thick and thin. Our brief affairs with a series of man-children our healthier selves couldn’t stand, too.
I name all the things
we both love: Odesza, Clean Bandit,
cigarette smoke
against rainy evening mist,
thirty-minute motel stay
with strangers, wearing our “woke” badges
online, an abstract depth
of existential abyss,
the fucking meaning of life. I was
the Gone Girl, you were
the after-nuclear attack thriving cockroach.
I name all that
we used to live for,
that we thought mattered
back in the day.
If only we knew they were detours, we would not have taken that metaphorical bus. But those were the days, those were the nights, dear loving bitch. I tell you clichés—crane your neck forward, point ahead to what is important: you. And that is to say: step back from the precipice, cut off all the noise, sift through the clamor. We’ve lived through the battles we’ve chosen. This is the part where we do not look back.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (them/they) is author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor of Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. Their nonfiction, poetry, and translation have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals and magazines such as Tolka (Ireland), No Contact Magazine (US), Voice & Verse (Hong Kong), Elsewhere Journal (Germany), Canthius (Canada), Punk Noir (UK), and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies by Anamot Press, Pilot Press London, Toothgrinder Press. Born and raised in Metro Cagayan de Oro in the southern Philippines, they’re currently living off-the-grid. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.