Easy to see that the man on top
of the box wearing a coat and tie
is in charge. Large machine parts
being dragged appear to belong
to trains. Workers stare back as they
piece together the veins
about to demarcate
which landscape
is the island’s margins,
and which one is its center.
***
Process note:
The University of Wisconsin Digital Collection has over 600 images from the Philippines accessible online to the general public. The images taken in Iloilo are mostly from a single album titled ‘American expatriate in Iloilo, Philippines.’ Aside from the years these photos were taken, 1907-1916, there’s very little information about them. Surveying the collection, one can presume they were captured by an amateur with a combination of curiosity and exoticism regarding the natives of the US’s then new colony in the Pacific. The poems I’ve written in response to these selected images aim to view them in anti-imperialist and ecocritical lenses, rather than the conventional ekphrastic mode. The titles for each poem is the exact label on respective photos in the digital collection.
