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Philippines Graphic Reader

Mother/Magical Creature/Crane

No one believes me when I say I’ve seen a magical creature. But what else do you call someone who grew lives from her own figure?  How would you explain the magnificent warmth that glows through her skin?   Can you tell me how a person could...

Palaspas

He awoke at dawn. Silvery light filtered through the paper-thin fabric of the handkerchief covering his eyes. His limbs were sore from being squeezed into the cramped hull of his bangka.     As he stood up, Silver stretched his limbs and let his knotted...

Hidden Sounds of Nature

White, fresh snowfall Its arrival, highly anticipated presents a silence All is absorbed All sounds trapped in all this snow The fluff, the layers have made it All quiet All slow Eventually It is no longer the flutter of snow that I hear Emerge The flutter of wings Bird songs Birds sing Come It is the arrival of spring

Sugar Dreams

She was finally here. Hong Kong. A place that wasn’t in her bucket list, but life had other plans and threw it her way. From her room on the twenty-fifth floor of East, one of the many chic hotels in Taikoo Shing, she...

TWO FOR PUNGAW (or “melancholy” in Bicolano)

A Filipino Stillness Not the light in Amorsolo’s canvas but the smile that kindles the frame. Not in dreams, where I lose you among crocodiles. Your silence, a dead end. Not during advent. When we descend on the archipelago. Famished birds buoyed by memories cleansed by storms. A...

Ashfall

After the blast, the local radio frantically reported “about forty thousand people running for their lives.” Fancy that. Following up on this, I then filed my first news story on the eruption with that “massive evacuation” angle that hit the Daily Star headline...

Random Pickings

The Quiet Animal

I couldn’t get off my mind, that morning when I was six years old, when my mother asked me to bury a dead animal....

Written After Viewing DengCoy Miel’s Rizal in the Land of Lilimut

The more this land drinks blood,the smaller the people getThe more people get smaller,the more their memories get scaled downWhittled down, all they recall...

Angel of Light

Eden Reyes Blanco sifted listlessly through the manila envelope of documents labeled Fairview House which her secretary had brought to her. She was having...

Palaspas

He awoke at dawn. Silvery light filtered through the paper-thin fabric of the handkerchief covering his eyes. His limbs were sore from being squeezed...