Filipino Symphony

by Lorri Ventura


Pink plastic bowls overflow with chicken feet
Ready for marination in brown sugar and spices,
Destined for transformation into a popular street food dubbed “Adidas”
After the athletic footwear.

Children waving paper fans 
Swat at orange-eyed flesh flies
Using the fowl feet as landing strips

Three hundred varieties of rice, 
More colorful than rainbows.
Purses made from massive, olive-drab frogs
Copper zippers holding their mouths closed.

Long lines of customers
Queue to purchase civet coffee,
A Filipino speciality brewed from
Java beans swallowed whole by an exotic feline and then excreted,
Enhanced by the fermentation of their digestive experience.

Acacia carvings—
Everything from furniture to phalluses
In heartwarming browns and reds.
Wafer cones dripping with purple ice cream
Made from yams.

In the center of an aisle lined with
Bird whistle toys and cloth dolls
A hand-printed sign points toward a ladder
That reaches upward to a dental office
Where patients can enjoy discounted tooth extractions
And also adopt rheumy-eyed puppies 
That wiggle and yip in a chewed, rattan basket
At the office entrance

Clusters of tailors
Race their antediluvian sewing machines
As they make tribal-patterned clothes “while-you-wait”.
Vendors sing of their wares and
Tug at the arms of passersby
In their quest to be noticed. 

In a dark alcove
Huddled between two looming trash dumpsters
A soot-covered old woman sits with a lapful of emaciated kittens.

She smiles and blows kisses to the crowds
Who throng past.
The woman’s arms wave,
One reflecting emotion
The other seeming to keep the market’s beat,
Conducting the symphony
That is the marketplace.


* * * * *

Lorri Ventura is a retired special education administrator living in Massachusetts. She is new to poetry-writing. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies, in Red Eft Journal, and in Quabbin Quills. She is a three-time winner of Writing In A Woman's Voice's Moon Prize.