Philippines Graphic Reader

Here my mother, who must have been in her early forties, sits on a stone ledge at Fort San Pedro overlooking the Guimaras Strait. The sun must have been strong, as she smiles, trying not to squint against the glare, as her left arm holds my then six-year-old...

In the year 1950, my village knew little of the Cold War although its geopolitical tremors reached even our mountains. The Philippine national government, backed by the Americans, was locked in a struggle against the Huk rebellion for control of Central Luzon's mountain...

One last time, my forgotten friend, poise your calloused hands and dig your battered heels into the dirt. Left behind by the new world. The others, glam dolls and pulpit idols, have all long gone. I watch as you reach the top, as a slow, hazy blues chord from a...

In the main gate opens at 0500H. My smart sports watch reads 0438H. Emerging from the shadows of the mango trees fronting the women's barracks, I walk briskly toward the lamppost. Silhouettes jog counterclockwise around the well-lit oval, their rhythmic strides breaking the...

I was seven a war marred my hometown Tíyo and the fishermen soldiers the deep sea battlefield a compound of the sea’s little bones of sable sands in a wicked bottle their arsenal made the Earth mumbled in tremulous waves the heavens bled scales of shattered souls to the flesh of my innocence.

2024 What do you want to say to a year yet to explain itself? The days are heaving, the hours a diary made meaningful with our ghosts: gray, tenuous, prone to our forgetting. Just tell me something new. Or describe to me freedom as an animal. Show me skin moistened by worship, waterfalls like...