There is a leaving

By ​Christine C. Rivero-Guisinga

that picks the smallest bones clean
 
that lets the morning light in 

​by the half-open door
of a child’s room

​that is an empty house

​with its crowded saints,
its quiet altars

​that is searching

​in the garden, calling out,
no one answers

​that becomes days of waiting 

short-lived, another
forgetting

that is waking

​fevered, too far away
in a city too bright at night

that is every chain through the gate

behind us, every street
with the wrong bus, every
parking lot where we heard the keys jangle,
we heard the locks turn,
where we were told this won’t take long

until the only way home: prayer, or
the phone number we were taught to repeat

that is still love 

​to be told,
never talk to strangers.

---

​Polaroids, etc. (Olongapo, summer, ‘83)

By ​Christine C. Rivero-Guisinga

​the rocks, talking on the hill
behind our grandparents’ house
 
the graveyard on the mountainside,
wind-worn tombstones crowding the slope
 
the aircraft carrier in the cove,
hulking gray mass between the trees
 
the jellyfish in the water,
dark tentacles and strawberry body
 
the green waves,
dad swimming up the white crest
 
little sister’s pink foot
on the tin of yellow sunflower crackers
 
crab tunnels under the table,
the sticks we left poking at their entrance
 
the brown sand on our knees,
sand crystals glittering from the floor of the car
 
our grandmother’s waterbed,
and the sea still heaving beneath our limbs

---

Hide and Seek, With Memories of My Grandmother

By ​Christine C. Rivero-Guisinga

After Bob Hicok

When the orchids disappeared, she said they’d been abducted. When her clothes wouldn’t fit, she said the orchids lost the needle. When the orchids learned they couldn’t sew, she brought them a melted candle. When the thread unspooled, she looked beneath the table. When she found her glasses, she said I hid them under the carpet. I turned off all the lights. She said I played with angels. I made up names for things I couldn’t see. She said the Santo Nino didn’t like the dark. I wanted the ball he held in his left hand.

---

​Christine C. Rivero-Guisinga works for a humanitarian organization. A SEA Lit Circle member, her writing has appeared in Pinhole Poetry, the After Happy Hour Review, The Ex-Puritan, and most recently in Full House Literary. Her piece in Briefly Write received the publication’s 2024 Poetry Prize. She shares travel photos and short poems inspired by the haiku form on Instagram @storyseamstress.