When you teach breastfeeding to the village's young mothers, I was told, the rudiments obvious — cleaning the nipples, how to tell when the milk goes sour or stale, the clam soup with lemon grass and horse radish to keep the nourishing surge coming - so, expect these girls to bare their own lessons for barter.

I expect nothing vast or vital, only something of immediate use, like how to make easy the backbreakstances of shore gleaning for drift weed or shell at lowtide, but

Today, Laureana asks if I've heard of the news over the radio

How in Paniqui, Bulacan a women clouds inside her belly swirled, the eddy of flesh there moltened into her first child of a mudfish.

Fifteen-year old Maria dreams out loud, I wonder the wonder, fishmouth the shape of a little star sucking the lukewarm yellow of colostrum.

Valeria, hawker of crabs and fish entrails, would like hers an angelfish, fins silent white wings underwater, its eyes so full of nothing, no clawing screams to rival her own hoarse voice braying past the village huts and by the blacksmith workshops. Then giggles Valeria, but we have to learn new tricks to keep away the cats, teach ourselves the habit of breeding mosquitos for babyfood, find out exactly how a suckling fry would smile, giggles Valeria the peddler, giggling as if to save herself from some pain.

My own thoughts ripplerush like the tapwaters I carry along within the pufferfish swell of my womb, my oddhearted eelchild, swimmming in the slow ooze of red mud to the rivermouth of the vagina.

I will name you Milk. Or Gold, or Faith. Or Consuelo, from the former conquerors' vocabulary, meaning, comfort. Or Mistral, after the dry wind and for her who wished a fisher's daughter a dreamful of fish, leaping and aglow.

You see, for us it is not difficult to believe in makebelieve. Though, of course, we do not call them makebelieve.
They are waters villagers dive into, far below the tethered purse seines of rea.son and reality. We keep them simple and true, these stories our living stirs afioat.

Today, in this school of mothers, nipples darken, and arise. All our dolphin minds together .somersaulting and somersaulting foward.

Lina Sagaral Reyes of "Writers Involved in Creating Cultural Alternatives" (WICCA) Philippine participant

Source: Sixth IWIIM