Poetry / Regine Cabato
:: As Fleabag ::
You’re the only man who sees straight through my camera. My own mother couldn’t take me to church. With you at the altar, I worship like a fleabag, which means I’m either a bitch or a seedy hotel, where the men come and go like guests, nowhere remotely close to the Grand Budapest. If I was born in Sodom instead of London, I’d be toast. On the game show of life, I insist on calling a friend to ask, have you figured it out yet? Sometimes the friend is Boo, sometimes it’s you, and sometimes it’s me when I’m fifty. If I live to silver my hair and still address an audience. Whenever I give God a call the line sizzles with static. Could you help me? I have so many questions I want to ask him. My therapist said he could be fucked. Was she for real? Why did he bother becoming human? We’re all turds. Will my sister ever find happiness? Will my best friend ever forgive me? I want to believe she and my mum are somewhere good, and maybe the fairy godmother will head down to the basement. How do I become a better feminist? Why were our bodies designed to shrivel? Sometimes I peer out into the hard world, and it’s like I’m the guinea pig. Does it get any easier? Are you even sure you’re a priest? How could you marry a couple in a garden? How do you give baptisms when you hate kids? What man of God would say he would marry me to someone else? I know you cut the line like that on purpose. You swapped the wine with G&T and gave me the pleasure of your company. Fuck you too, Father, but forgive me for I have sinned. Maybe calling you that does turn me on. I promise I won’t tell God. I forgive you too. I hope he’ll let me borrow you for an hour or two. This communion is the most whole I’ve ever been. Thanks for taking me as I am: fake miscarriage and loose buttons and monologues. I can quit performing now, because you’ve seen the view from the cheap seats, that disastrous dinner, the full stage of this one woman show. You’ve tamed this wild thing in me. You’ve pulled me out of this hundred acre wood and into another sadness, this time with the gratefulness of a glen: how lucky I am to have someone who makes saying good-bye so hard. I’ll be at home or the bar or the café but every time you spook my mind, I’ll send a fox your way. Its tail will disappear down the corner of your every corridor. It will jump headfirst into the blanket of snow on your churchyard. It will come knocking on the door of your silent retreat, hunting for your name.
:: The Greyhound ::
I’m feeling more frequently the blues you caught in December. Last we saw each other, you walked me to the bus stop down the curb from The Greyhound. You talked me into talking to you until morning. We were heading back out of that well-fed university kennel and into the dog-eat-dog world. Since arriving in England, I’ve hunted foxes and haunted terminals, longing to tame and be tamed. I’ve never before wanted so hard to graduate from my school of shame. That spring, we had a Sunday roast, making the most of the Port Meadow winter melt. Passing the ghost bicycle by The Plain, you turned toward me with a grin that made me want to hurry up out of my upbringing. Outside the pub, you cradled my face in your palms and said, your life still needs some living. I was too young to consider the consequence of your voice ringing in my ears all evening. If you wanted to, you could have brought me to a heel. But you were a good master, the kind of gentleman who spoke in Garamond. I didn’t look forward to turning corners in a city without you. In spite, I left my laughter tangled in your hair on purpose. I learned to walk my own leash. Recently, I heard they put down The Greyhound. You told me there once the next time you would see me, I would be happy. I’m happy now, I told you then. You said, beaming, you’re only beginning.
From the writer
:: Account ::
When I first moved to England in the fall of 2022, my friends joked that I was entering my “Fleabag era,” although I was not entirely sure what that meant. I had been accepted into a fellowship program suggested to me by a former professor, a priest who was at the time living in London. I had not lived abroad or alone until then, but I understood this leap as a necessary rite into adulthood. Although I did not know what to expect, I have done a lot of growing up in the last three years. Both poems are love poems as much as self-love poems, about graduating from the gaze of the older men you place on a pedestal in your twenties. I’ve had the good fortune of not encountering anyone who has exploited this power over me.
The poems are also reference exercises in pop culture, particularly the BBC series Fleabag and Taylor Swift’s song “The Black Dog,” from her album The Tortured Poets Department. The former takes on the persona of the unnamed heroine (or anti-hero) played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The latter follows a prompt from the poetry collection Invisible Strings edited by Kristie Frederick-Daugherty, who had poets respond to songs by Swift. I thought “The Black Dog” was brilliant and familiar; “The Greyhound” references a pub in Oxford, where I was based for half a year. But while Swift’s song rings with resentment, I wanted to respond with bittersweetness. At the core of grief, I found, is gratitude.
Regine Cabato is from the Philippines. Her poetry has appeared in The Margins, Cordite Poetry Review, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal among others. She won the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for poetry in English in 2019.