The Philippines Graphic Reader
The first and only magazine on Philippine literature in English
LET YOUR SHORT STORY OR POEM SHINE!
Fiction
Autumn Song
He was there again tonight. Seated at the last table of the small, dark bar, a lighted cigar in his hand, looking at me...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Tropical Sundews
this is the timewhen the greens are greener than beforeas above so belowthe midges regret worshippingthe false god of all false beingsthe dewdrops and...
Fiction
The Room Next Door
FICTION — I never really knew Eric. He was the kind of neighbor you saw often but never truly saw—a blur of dark shirts and headphone wires, slipping down the stairs with his phone in one hand and a plastic bag of instant noodles or soda in the other. Always alone.
Philippines Graphic Reader
Naked
I’ll wear nothingbut my trembling desirethe wild beat of my pulsethe lingering whispers of my past.
I’ll wear nothingbut the ache of my lost love the...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Grandma
Her hands quiver
from sustained pressing of the beads.
When her voice starts to rise,
the light of the kerosene lamp amplifies
from an entirely lambent glow,
illuminating the...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Inverted Horizons
The sea and the sky
Swap their eternities
The waves with the clouds
And everywhere
Fishes fly birds swim
Farmers cast seines
Fishers sow seeds
Waterways counterflow
Waterfalls go into reverse
All of...
Fiction
By the Brook
I
Nina’s eyes peer above the cover of a nameless book. She wasn’t reading, no. Her eyes are fixed on the distant figure of her...
Fiction
The Quiet Animal
I couldn’t get off my mind, that morning when I was six years old, when my mother asked me to bury a dead animal....
Philippines Graphic Reader
TWO POEMS ON FATHERHOOD
Shoes
Paper cutouts folded to fit
my back pocket. I carry them along
through bus ride and train tracks.
I’ll be gone for a few hours.
My daughters look...
Literature
What a Child Cannot Learn from Books
When you wound a leather sofa
with the forbidden razor blade,
you see no cut but a blooming,
cotton pulp breaches skin, first peeps
and bursts out almost...
Fiction
House of Leaves
“A week ago, just before you arrived, DongJosé,” my grandfather was telling me in between locomotive puffs from his rolled lomboy cigar. “A damn...
Literature
The Bullet Wakes from Its Cruel Shell
I dance through air with a deadly grace.
Yet mourn the lives I cannot replace.
Once a vessel of power, now burdened with guilt,
I pierced through...
Fiction
The One-Night Stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Maribel glanced at her plane seat, grateful that she had the aisle seat and only one seat beside her. Her seat mate was a...
Philippines Graphic Reader
One Little Less
One little less of me —
a hand, an awe, a feather falling free.
one little much an eye; one too little, still more
to be.
One too...
Fiction
The Desert
Roel alighted the taxi he took from Ulaanbaatar’s train station to his guest house. He immediately felt the biting chill of the city’s subzero...
Philippines Graphic Reader
Washout
I
So in a fit of righteous anger
I washed the pots pans
plates bowls knives spoons glasses
even cleaned the kitchen sink and the drawers,
which I haven’t...
