SUMMER FIGS 

when I turn seventy & you are gone,
will my muscles still heft with ease 

a crate of summer figs—one 
bruised fig for every year of my life— 

from the tree in your backyard? 
I want to believe you, too, 

will still be carrying a box of fruit, 
somewhere on this earth, gravity

always pulling us to each other, 
toward molten core. time is vertical, 

just as much as it’s marked from left 
to right in a high school textbook. 

& there’s a certain quiet that follows 
mothers when they give their children 

treasures that used to be their own. 
my hands will always be stained purple 

& green, as if having held on too hard 
while picking swollen fruit, wooden 

limbs shadowing in the sullen wind. 
I don’t like thinking of inevitable things: 

you, somewhere I can’t see you—
the earth, its dirt dissolving. 

me, back curving inward— 
a box of figs at my feet.

Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. Their forthcoming collection Reverse Requiem is slated for publication in April 2026 (Alice James Books). In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.