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i.
In 1922, colonial engineer Eusebius Halsema
began commissioning Igorot and Japanese
laborers to carve the face of a mountain.
They whittled its edges, hauled
and hewed its heft
and cleaved its
shoulders.
Uprooted, the native and foreign hands have shoveled through the years.
Their heads bowing to this mountain that collapsed to its knees.
Calloused fingers dug away the dirt that lined their palms,
clutching their centavos that unclenched the mountain.
Birthing in earthquake, a narrow stretch of vein
that passaged and trembled into
The Mountain Trail to be-
come the American
Town.
ii.
This is where Fas-ang first walked among her brothers and sisters,
hoping to be miners, wishing to have their hands shake the earth
like their fathers and their fathers' fathers and their mothers, too.
She sat on an outcrop. Behind her, the thinning outline of her village.
On her back, she carried home, woven safely in a small basket.
She prayed to this crumbling earth. This footpath that stretched to a promised
land that calloused her soles. She did not want to walk further, farther
from home is here,...