Destination
i. There are only metaphors for becoming. Only the sibuyas un-peeling its layers calachuci spreading their petals paruparo emerging from cocoons events of blossoming, acts of uncovering, of nakedness. There are no great […]
Matt OD
Subic Bay
for Felipe Niceties never killed anyone, just words, said trying at kindness, now tired, as if in a boat race to the finish. I will always out talk you and you will smile softly like a lover steeling the self for a particular cruelty: the sting, here at the shore, waves hurtling sea-spray towards […]
Midway
There are few places worth committing to memory—one: the New York skyline, two: the traffic on EDSA, three: the horizon in which we never meet: the sun, the sky, the sliver of water between us. Tell me where you are and I’ll tell you what you are: an immigrant in NYC is a foreigner in […]
Fair Game
I only ever wanted to say mahal in parting, but you could never have understood how much of an expense love was to me. I only half understand my mother tongue, only carry half its baggage. Which country is Mother? Which country caverns me? It only takes language to assimilate—our accent differing from town to […]
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan Q&A on a poem she wishes she’d written
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan talks about a poem she wishes she’d written, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan Q&A on the genesis of her poem ‘Fair Game’
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan talks about the genesis of her poem “Fair Game.”
Weather
A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water. Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted in cold salt […]
Shorelines
Whatever is the opposite of keening, that is the sound the waves make, trawling themselves across the long shallow shore in Ogunquit, Maine: home, in another century, to fishermen who built a tidewater basin, furrowing the soft marshland, digging a channel to give safe harbor to boats named “Susan Bee,” “Clementine,” and “Anna Mae.” In […]