Kahon

2025 | Francis Colburn Gallery | USA

Kahon is a luggage bag cast in paper pulp featuring casket handles and gold trimming, decorated with live flowers that decay over time. It is reminiscent of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who leave their motherland to work abroad only to find themselves in harrowing circumstances.

Kahon

Beyond the open seas, a box

contains the weight of half-goodbyes.

Birthdays, pastimes lost in passage.

Balikbayan marked with red.  

She sends us love remittances

as we speak tongues they translate wrong.

Since protections won’t protect her,

we theorize news from dropped calls.

We dream nostalgic gatherings

that make the waiting justified.

Hopeful stories, haunting endings.

Bodies tagged like luggage bags.

Once her labor is depleted,

she drifts abroad, away from Earth.

Restricting her from human rights,

they ship back a heavy box.