By Troy Osaki

In the Philippines, we abolish goodbye parties for Filipinos
who don’t want to leave—become overseas Filipinos.

Every colonizer wants to be remembered—see our country
whose name is a Spanish king’s name. Philip in Filipino.

The smell of mined dirt is gone. Chevron swims back
to America weeping. We watch, laughing—us Filipinos.

In a monsoon, we bring Andrés Bonifacio’s glowing bones
to a sugar plantation. There: an army of peasant Filipinos.

Their first 53 years spent lovingly burying piles of land-
lords. Every bloomed mango belongs to a farming Filipino.

My grandpa left & didn’t come back. Years later, I lay
in the river he washed in—my body, like his, Filipino.

His last name is my middle name, Verzosa. Spanish
as am I & millions       of  breathing             Filipinos.

Poet Bio

Troy Osaki is the grandson of Filipino immigrants and the great-grandson of Japanese immigrants. Osaki is a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, the Margins, Muzzle magazine, Poetry Northwest, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. Osaki holds a law degree from the Seattle University School of Law, where he interned at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in King County. He organizes for national democracy in the Philippines while living in Seattle, Washington. See More By This Poet