Unburied fruit, so young & soured-struck

sonnet no. liii

This is the fifth poem in a crown of sonnets, which began at sonnet 48. Since beginning I’ve had many new subscribers, and I’m hoping all my readers will be patient as I work through this series. It is esoteric, and for fear these poems come off as proper navel-gazing, I’d like to introduce a short note for context.

The crown’s premise is a confrontation between a first generation Filipino-American woman and a white man. The woman, a hotel concierge, is asking about the Baybayin script tattooed on the white man’s arm. Whereas she is hurt to see her heritage on a clearly foreign body, the man has a personal connection to the script which he finds difficult to disassociate from appropriation and colonization; the whole crown, then, is a dreamscape in which he attempts to do just that.

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