Artist Spotlight: Jan Lunette
Janica Favis (she/her) was born in Baguio City, Philippines, and spent most of her teenage years in Manila before immigrating to the UK to pursue higher education. She is a twenty-one-year-old aspiring author/poet who writes under the pseudonym ‘Jan Lunette’. Currently, she is a second year English Literature and Linguistics student at the University of York in Northeast England. Her work mainly consists of poetry that tackles her experiences of having two homes, which aim to inspire others to untangle the strings of their hearts and souls to find the roots of their existence, whether that be places, people, or themselves.
Morena
The colour of her skin
makes golden hour last
for days, years, a lifetime
in which the sun never sets.
In Maori, she is the good morning
when coffee neither burns your tongue
or cools your soul. The salt bread melts
and breaks apart like the handful of light
umber gems I steal from the ocean floor.
Tidal kisses soften my heart
and beneath her body, I settle;
on her lips, I keep afloat.
A Sotho sovereign,
high on a pedestal made of clouds,
she is clothed in Cirrus’ wispy strokes,
couched on temperate Stratus,
and crowned with Cumulus’ curls.
Leza, the sky god she loved,
withdraws from the tangerine sky
to worship her.
A Filipino beauty
misunderstood, she is
a Pacific siren singing forgotten hymns
and secret folksongs, a relic of land
no longer home.
Apolaki’s weeping hand weaves
a tapestry on her sun-dust coloured skin
and beneath congealed blood,
I find lost tribes and stolen islands;
her body — a landscape
of a past often shelved,
but always rewritten;
her life — fathered by dying wishes
beats to the rhythm of jackfruit drums
and repeated verse of ancestral breath:
Remember us.
Remember us.
Remember us.
Land Recaptured, Bodies Reclaimed
Uneven eyelids, wide button nose,
downward turned lip, dark clusters of melanin,
earthy baby hands, and arched Orient feet.
Wherever I go, I bring these fragments
of my family’s legacy, carrying
and containing their will.
My mother looks at me and remembers
the man she once loved.
She says my mind works just like his,
but my heart beats like hers.
I am labelled with his initials;
my first name — a variant of his.
An English epithet conceals
how much I miss him.
She teaches me words I have forgotten,
driving out the British from capturing my soul,
reminding me the vocabulary of my blood
is different from that of my tongue
as harsh plosives and hoarse nasals
flow in, through, and out of me.
The spirits of my lolo and lola penetrate my poetry
with stubborn ardent valour and bellowing tenderness.
At my boarders, they stand tall
like Philippine ironwood,
sending each navigator back home.
Coconut husks polish my thoughts
so I can write Arabian Jasmines
that bloom and bud with purpose.
My words, like burned incense and peeled ponkan,
perfuse the page and mark the world they have left
with poems declaring:
I am theirs,
as much as they are mine.
The Tune of Bolo Knives
My mother composes lullabies
out of the history of my country.
The sound of my lineage
rings with her voice.
Agueda, our Joan of Arc,
plays the strings of her throat,
conjuring breath that beats
with the melody of a rifle:
inhaling a bang,
exhaling a plung,
drawing in a zing,
blowing out BRATATAT!
The book of Psalms fall on her lips
as they part in loud booming calls
to both past and present revolts,
cradling her own heroic kin.
She gallantly buzzes and ripples;
like the love child of trumpet horns
and violin bows, she conceives
kaleidoscopic timbres.
Angels descend
with every progressive note
pitched high and on their wings,
I witness Henerala.
A free-flowing mane,
finding life away from Spain.