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ISSA, ONE AND ONLY
I am Issa—the one and only. My parents named me Juan, which in English sounds like “one.” In Tagalog, “one” is isa, just like my name. Well, sort of—it’s Issa, pronounced, Ee-sah.
In my language, we don’t say “she” or “he,” we say...
Arranging Furniture at Midnight
I move chairs at midnight,
Adjusting my wife’s preference
Which one is facing which.
The cats are doing football
Banging on tables and walls.
All six of them,
Siamese versus Persian
All team High Maintenance.
My angry wife wakes up,
Reminding us she needs to sleep.
I’d pay for this in the morning,
When...
The Times, They Are A-Changing
Saturday. The afternoon’s stifling heat is rising in waves. Rogie crosses the road and pushes the gate of the compound of Dr Rieu’s residence. Rogie notices some village chiefs treating themselves with soft drinks. After the usual welcome by their candidate for town...
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...
