If you ask the poet Myrna Peña-Reyes what her favorite poem is—as I did only a few days ago—you will be surprised that it’s not “Breaking Through,” although that’s her most anthologized poem, the one she is most well-known by. I love that poem, too, and used to teach it when a course on Philippine Literature was still something to be had in college. But, to be honest, it’s also not my favorite of poem of hers.

The one I love the most is one of her most Dumaguete-centric poems, “At Camp Lookout.” But that is not her favorite poem either. It’s something titled “Ethnic at Checkout Counter”—and I completely understand why that is her choice. That poem is an incisive and ironic look, in the voice only Myrna Peña-Reyes can pen, at immigrant life she used to have when she was living in the United States. Come to think of it, my favorite of her poems and her favorite of her poems invariably talk about “home.”

She was born in Cagayan de Oro, a child of the southern landscape—lush, rivered, restless, and her early years were steeped in the pulse of provincial life. But it was in Dumaguete, where her father, the great biologist Alfredo Reyes, took up a teaching post at Silliman University, where Peña-Reyes’ sensibility as a poet truly formed. At Silliman, under the tutelage of the Tiempos, she found not only the discipline of craft but a community of writers who valued precision and quiet truth. Her poems from those years reveal an eye that lingers—on light, on silence, on the textures of ordinary days.

Later, with her husband, the American poet William Sweet, she settled in Oregon, where the distances from the Philippines grew longer, the seasons sharper. The immigrant years deepened her voice; her poems began to speak from the fault line between belonging and estrangement. In the grocery aisles, in the long grey of American rain, she traced the small negotiations of identity—Filipino, woman, writer—each one both burden and inheritance. We see this in her first book, The River Singing Stone.

When she returned to Dumaguete after many years abroad, it was not with nostalgia but with a kind of tempered clarity. Her later poems—in Almost Home and Memory’s Mercy—carry that tone: measured, unsentimental, but tender toward the landscapes that made her. Peña-Reyes’ life and work unfold across geographies, but always circle back to one enduring question—what, and where, is home?

Let’s explore this in her favorite poem:

Ethnic at Checkout Counter

The clerk chants the prices
as she punches the register keys.
Her smile is bemused.
I watch my fish heads
dive under chicken livers,
ox tails bounce against beef tongue,
pig’s feet squirm under tripe.
The line behind me stares silently.

Then when she announces the sum
and starts to bag
I take my time. I write a check.
They often think:
Another food stamp ethnic.

It is a small, searing poem of displacement—an immigrant’s moment of reckoning at the banal altar of the supermarket. In the measured precision of its imagery, the poem captures what it means to live in quiet translation: to inhabit a body, a culture, and a grocery cart that all announce otherness in a land that pretends to smile but still stares.

The poem opens in the mundane rhythm of transaction—“The clerk chants the prices / as she punches the register keys.” The verb “chants” immediately transforms the scene from mechanical to ritualistic, the checkout counter turned into a site of performance and judgment. Peña-Reyes’ speaker stands exposed under the fluorescent lights, her choice of groceries—“fish heads,” “ox tails,” “pig’s feet,” “tripe”—marking her unmistakably as alien. But the poet wields these images with both pride and unease: they are emblems of memory and inheritance, but here they are rendered almost grotesque under the gaze of an audience [presumably a white one]. The phrase “The line behind me stares silently” lands like a verdict.

The immigrant’s negotiation of identity here is not one of loud defiance but of subtle resistance. When the speaker says, “I take my time. I write a check,” it is a small assertion of dignity in a space that expects her shame. The slow gesture becomes a reclamation of agency, an insistence on visibility. Peña-Reyes’ final line—“They often think: / Another food stamp ethnic”—burns with weary irony. The voice is neither angry nor pleading; it is exhausted, aware of how stereotypes flatten complexity.

In a few taut lines, Peña-Reyes crystallizes the immigrant experience in America: the daily humiliations that pass as ordinary, the quiet strength it takes to remain seen, and the unspoken ache of carrying one’s culture through aisles that do not recognize its worth. Home, in the reality of that grocery store, feels so far away.

Her poem “At Camp Lookout,” on the other hand, is a poem of quiet distance, of standing high above the world and trying to make sense of what it means to belong to it:

At Camp Lookout

Fog haze, morning chill
chart our days:
linger under blankets,
breakfast at ten, then
ascend a weedy trail,
lift our faces to the sun,
the wind fancying our hair;
listen how the mountain sings:
bird calls, insects, wind
in the trees, billowing the grass,
the trickle of a hidden stream,
the sudden startle of wings!

Down in the sweltered plains
doll houses, offices, streets lost
in the toy towns with borders
blurred in the clustered trees;
bathtub boats streaking a silver sea,
curve of shoreline holding back
the deep; Siquijor, Sumilon, Cebu
breaking up its sparkle and sweep;
and at the airfield scarring the land
planes descending, taking off—
we’re here to escape them all.
How distant they all seem!

Late afternoon,
the monotone cricket song,
cicada wings shivering the air,
bats navigating the dusk.
Soon the firefly hour,
Night’s bright sentinels encamped in the sky.
Far below, the town lights blaze,
ship lights crawl their slow trails
across the blackened sea,
drop below the horizon,
fade, flicker, sink.

Drawn downward,
our thoughts turn home,
the lowlands closer than we think.

Here, “home” is both a physical landscape and a state of mind—something the poet must leave in order to see clearly, and something that calls her back even from the farthest vantage point. The poem becomes a meditation on the tension between escape and return, between the ache for solitude and the gravity of rootedness.

From the first lines, Peña-Reyes situates us in the rarefied air of retreat: “Fog haze, morning chill / chart our days.” The mountain is a refuge from the “sweltered plains,” where life unspools in the clutter of “doll houses, offices, streets lost / in the toy towns.” To be at Camp Lookout [in Valencia town] is to be removed—to exchange the noise of daily living for the elemental: “bird calls, insects, wind / in the trees.” The poet’s diction is stripped clean, rhythmic in its stillness. This is home reimagined as simplicity, as the purity of hearing the world breathe. Yet, beneath the serenity, there is the knowledge that this peace is only possible in absence—an absence from the very world that made her.

Home, then, is complicated. From the mountain, the towns below appear “blurred,” the sea “silver,” the islands “breaking up [their] sparkle and sweep.” The distance transforms them, miniaturizes them, but never quite erases their hold. Peña-Reyes’ gaze, however, is tender and never scornful. The poem acknowledges the beauty of detachment, but also the pull of connection. The mountain grants her perspective, but not release.

As night falls, the poem begins its slow return. The speaker listens to “cicada wings shivering the air,” then watches the “ship lights crawl their slow trails / across the blackened sea.” These images of navigation and movement [bats, ships, fireflies] are metaphors of longing. They mirror the speaker’s own drift between solitude and belonging. By the end, she concedes to the magnetic pull of home: “Drawn downward, / our thoughts turn home, / the lowlands closer than we think.”

This final image captures Peña-Reyes’s mature understanding of home—not as the idyllic space of escape, but as an ever-present gravity. No matter how high she climbs, or how far her thoughts wander, home is the pulse that calls her back. In the luminous quiet of Camp Lookout, she finds not distance from home, but a clearer way of seeing it.

In both poems, Peña-Reyes charts two dimensions of home [and exile]: the immigrant’s alienation in a foreign land and the exile of distance from home. The first unfolds in the fluorescent glare of a supermarket, where belonging is questioned with every stare; the second, in the serene remove of a mountain, where belonging is remembered from afar. One poem bristles with the quiet humiliation of being seen as other; the other softens into homesickness and return. Together they trace Peña-Reyes’s lifelong negotiation between displacement and the fragile comfort of finding home again.