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Philippines Graphic Reader
Maalwan, Nilad’s Babaylan (Spirit Medium)
Nilad, the largest city in the archipelago, is famed for its magnificent port where its namesake white flowers bloom everywhere. Large ships from beyond the archipelago dock and unload their cargo of dyed cloth, glazed earthenware, and slaves. All who come and live...
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...
