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Philippines Graphic Reader
Patterns
The chisel as creator
Lends shape to wood, to stone.
Shape being the truth of character,
Reality of body and bone,
Sculpted fact of form,
The confidence of matter.
The paintbrush as creator
Draws maps of rainbows,
Contours of celebrations,
Then blends faithful colors
With their reserved spaces.
Spaces being the measure of possibilities
That...
Long before Darkness, Or, The Night Ileana Fell in Love
She had lived in the shadows all her life. Literally this meant the shadows of the mountains in the rural town where she was born and where she spent the earliest years of her childhood. Then came the shadows of the skyscrapers that...
Indignation as Elegy
An elephant without a face greeted me
on Facebook today,
his trunk and tusks
hacked away by poachers eager for ivory.
At first I thought it was a watermelon
sliced in half,
mistaking the pinkish blood
for the pulpy flesh of succulent fruit.
Why bother to extract excessive teeth
and risk being...
All Fall Down
Anatalia Ayala had promised Bellisima Cua that the story and photos about her winning the Volzhacker Prize would appear in the newspaper’s online lifestyle section this week. These had not seen print in any of the inner pages of the main broadsheet’s news...
Eight Legs Is All
It’s unfair. With small bodies, they move in all directions. Once a leg gets broken—which usually happens when they resist to be caught—they have seven more to spare. No difference. They still move like they used to.
Kuya Ping is one of the tikri...
The King who Had Nothing
“What makes a man a king?” A young pauper asked as he sat on his father’s lap. They sat meekly on the side of an alleyway near the town square, under the shadow of a hill where a majestic castle stood. Amidst the...
