Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007), winner of a Global Filipino Literary Award. He lives in New York City and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, his poems appeared in American Life in Poetry, World Literature Today, PEN International, North American Review, Callaloo, Bloomsbury Review, Gulf Coast, Gay & Lesbian Review, and the […]
My mermaid, I watched you scaling milkfish. Your hands and arms were silver, and your body flecked with otherworldly raindrops. You were a silver mine to be mined. Perched on a high branch of your mother’s mango tree, I saw only a glimmer of the blade as you scaled the fish, up- and-down strokes, repeatedly, […]
After dinner, when the plates rest on their rack, drying, my grandmother ambushes me at the kitchen table. She hands me a contract, a term of payment for a plot of land at Rose Hills cemetery. She asks me to calculate her leftover balance. While I add and deduct, in long hand, she sits there, […]
As soon as we became men my brother and I wore skirts. We pinched our skirt-fronts into tents for our newly-circumcised penises, the incisions prone to stick painfully to our clothing. I was partial to my sister’s plaid skirt, a school uniform she outgrew; my brother favored one belonging to my grandmother, flowers showering down […]
First mouth, where my mother first kissed me, I offer my finger to figure the depth of my separation, Gulf Divide, terra incognita, crater in the Sea of Tranquillity, a momentary attachment, a detachment for the rest of my life, Pangaea before the continental drift, an ocean subsided into white desert, a whirlpool quieted, my […]
When I see men with breasts, mammillary, twin elfin mounds bulging through shirts, I suppress the bubbles of emotions that might burp out of me—a moan, a giggle. I think: nubile children trapped in adult men, daughters hidden in their bodies, the women in these men manifesting themselves. Do their hands make pilgrimages to these […]
A peck is a red poppy. Several is a bird feeding on your hand. The first kiss is the customary rose given, a bouquet received by two. On the right side of her mouth, she is your mother. On the left side, she’s the sister you never had. A simmering moist kiss is cherry pie. […]
It is a short book. God in His righteous glory conjures up everything: the separation of Light and Dark, firmaments, land and sea, vegetation and beasts. On the sixth day God, in His image, create Adam and Adam, sons of His patriarchal regime. Then God rest. Then, no begetting. No litanies of descendants. Hence, fatal […]