The days could wilt anytime
soon, turn crisp and crumble.
As if a celluloid film is plastered
all over town, its sepia getting
dimmer and dimmer each morning.
Most homes have become so alike
in their disquiet. So the time has come
to fill a house with life and identity:
plants of sundry shapes and sizes,
sheen and shade, varying variegations.
Succulents, shrubs, stunted trees
and potted vines, ornamental or
inconsequential. Plants with
a list of faulty bestial tendencies—
snake plants without hiss and scales,
spiders without legs of frayed thread,
elephants without trunks (which
are about the same as the ancient
living boulders painfully revoked
of their license to possess ivory
across Asia and Africa). Because
home is music you keep playing
no matter the mood, some plants
are ordained with a concert in mind—
pipes, trumpets, bells and horns,
drums. Or such prized gems like
the fiddle-leaf fig, always in a corner
by the window, removed from the rest,
aloof and a-leafed. A dapper gent
that insists on dappled light in this
kingdom. The house is both garden
and showroom now, a pocket of jungle,
a well-curated paradise, and outside
a world that has long lost its gardener.
Photo: Tiia Pakk (2020)
Poet Bio
Home?
The Philippines.
What is home to you?
Home is what calms you, like that music you listen to when the noise is too much. Thus, home could be anywhere.
F. Jordan Carnice is a creative writing graduate at Silliman University and also an information technology graduate at STI College. His works have seen print in Ani, Katitikan: The Literary Journal of the Philippine South, Sunday Times Magazine, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among other publications. He has recently won the poetry grand prize in the 2020 Cebu Climate Emergency Literature and Arts Competition for his poem “There is Too Much Light in this World.” He has released two poetry collections—Weights & Cushions (2018) and How to Make an Accident (2019). He is also a visual artist.