Last instructions before the time machine disappeared with its traveler

It is possible to be happy in dog years.

The thing to remember is that we like cakes
and there will always be calamities.

Sometimes God arrives in your life like bird
poop in your hair. Sometimes death visits

in the form of a butterfly. Do what you must
to learn all the recipes now before you pick

up a phone and realise there’s no one to call.
Always pour for others at the table. Love will

find you undressing before someone with all
the lights on. Honour the forgiveness that comes

with age. It’s okay to order the same thing from
the menu again. At some point there will be

whooping for joy, just beyond your door.
Be the marrow that clings inside your bones.

The fist embraced by your ribs is home. Let it open
like a mouth reclaiming your place. It is your holy duty

to make sure they know how to say your name. If you
are on an odyssey, I bid you good luck and a good

sandwich. Carry poems in your pocket. If you are
at a crossing, go where you feel there’ll be a kindness.

Follow your nose. The answer is yes.

Chronicle of My Thirty-Seventh Year

I have long carried this body
from place to place for almost
forty years, a sarcophagus
above ground biding my time

I thought I would be done
by now, let time and life
do its work, macerate flesh
into a sad, thick pulp

I thought I would be done
with all the wanting, thought
the procession is almost over
after years of waiting for it

How was I supposed to know
the fist resting inside my ribcage
is not petrified, that it uncurls
into a map of aches and days?

Have you seen what it does, how
it cups around myself as if I was
a flame that would blow away?
How it reaches for your mouth?

---

T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and the author of And Yet Held (Bull City Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, The Greensboro Review, Puerto del Sol, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A 2025 VONA Summer Fellow, she has been nominated for Best of the Net and was a finalist for the Pleiades’ Prufer Poetry Prize. She is the founder of Read A Little Poetry. She lives and writes in Manila, Philippines. Read more of her work at tdelosreyes.com.