The Philippines Graphic Reader
The first and only magazine on Philippine literature in English
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Philippines Graphic Reader
Another War
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...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Three Poems Before 2025
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...
Fiction
The Eyes that Follow
So this is how most women die, she learned, lying in pain on the floor of the main hallway at the governor’s palace. Forgotten.
Her...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Una oda a la música
May this poem be heard as a testament of Amorsolo’s “History of Philippine Music” and his artistry.
Winds already touched the glistening sails
of a boat...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Cinnamon Rolls
A covenant was made.
You trod on my soil.
You breathed my air.
Here, tonight,
I am having dinner.
The hall would have fit in
Many exuberant guests,
But I only...
Fiction
The Maids’ Revolt
The gunfire echoed along the ship’s corridor. Kuya One, who was known only by his call sign, welcomed the sound this time, as it...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Retrograde
The force of fate couldn’t fight for us.Venus showed me the way to youjust as I pointed her and the Moonfor you to gaze.He...
Fiction
Reflections on the Void
I’ll begin with a crude reduction of La Bruyere’s opening paragraph from Les Characteres: Nothing here is meant to be the first of its...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Stranger
You had been here
You had come wading to shore
Wearing a raiment of corals and sea grass
And flotsam surrendered by the sea
You had been in...
Fiction
The Backroom Angels Bugaloo
No one, least of all her schoolmates at St. Celestina’s Academy, would have pictured Chona Laon Badoy as the Mayor of San Semilla in...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Tears for Sparta
Sparta, thank youfor being my faithful friendI am not your masterYou are my teacherFor you taught me to smilewhen inexplicable sorrows came byYou are...
Fiction
The Birth of Zaroasther
They connived with the dark shadows, the family who lived in a house full of glass windows and graven saints. Toraja invited me to...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Rush Hour
How’s life, old buddy
Between seventy and eighty,
eighty and ninety
Perpetually in a hurry
Heading for the cemetery
Amid emotional poverty
Are we racing against time
Or the lack of...
Fiction
Homecoming
The train slowed down. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. A middle-aged lady wearing a double-breasted coat told him his stop was near. He...
Philippines Graphic Reader
At the Seine
Were the ripples at the river Seine
My memories, your face will be broken
Into a thousand pieces, each fragment of you
Cut into countless shimmers
Dancing in...
Fiction
Tabuc Suba
Cicadas talk to each other in loud, prolonged streaks of staccato bursts. For a few minutes before sunset, the insects make sound and give...
