Ambient Mom

materiality, maternality, inherencewhen rhythm, sonority, ambient sound

      is what your mother shares      with you while you are      part of her body

inherence not inheritance

      never been      separate

perlocutionsaligned or resistant toutterance

      meanwhile coloniality simulates      ownership + possession

      a poetic self      tracing the origins

the day came to state whatcame through the reference portaleverything done alreadythe therapist’s usual

“language of my mother”

      each sound already       a distinct vehicle      + tenorreturn      impossibilitya holenot wound or glory      of first being

if Daryl Hannah can learn humanie English from daytime tv surelya cry melody + a kitchen tablemake for the mimeticdiptych of kinship

a full-on underworldin the subconscious real

      an address circuit      across seven generations      of domestic space

        - Damania   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --          - Marciana   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -            - Antonia - Maria - Ceriaca   - - - - -              - Nemecia - Querina - Asunción - Josefa                - Felicidad - Presentación                  - Bernardina Rosalinda                      - Kimberly

“unseen accomplices” an apparition floats above the bed scene Mother of Perpetual Help saved her bleeding + no blood available family pilgrimage to Manaoag every May a daughter is an ex-voto having witnessed most of the twelve pregnancies she was alive for at the foot of the bed became an obstetrician queen prays the novena continuously in addition to daily Mass she the narrative testimony of a saint- or a Mary-in-action in the wake of catastrophe

a pregnancy of hidden perilsfraughtness the result of

four years of stoicismsublimation sinking intothe invisible the miraclemanifestation an echochamber lined with ears

  “receptacle”   “the space  in which drives enter  language”     “space,  area, land”     “that set up  the possibility of signification”

ear’s native illiteracy

    through the line + reference  not just surface

hums + murmurs    deictics + their opposite

heartbeat, hand gestures    the breath the primped

    hair follicle    distant kin the finger

genealogy reanimation

    a recorded archive of babies    crying in Pangasinan

    rises + falls    tonal lengths

the occasion totry out consonantsis when the crycuts into

another language

      + speaker / reader circuit      + obscures      + all other circuits

this composingin unlearnedlanguages

prenatal perceiving +processing prosodic patternsa Pangasinan of the everyday“palpability of experience”

  — novena — stretching — zumba — mass — lunch — nap — walk — gardening —