The Philippines Graphic Reader
The first and only magazine on Philippine literature in English
LET YOUR SHORT STORY OR POEM SHINE!
Philippines Graphic Reader
Sisyphus, Rockstar
One last time, my forgotten friend,
poise your calloused hands
and dig your battered heels into the dirt.
Left behind by the new world.
The others, glam dolls...
Fiction
The Gunner of APC 314
In the main gate opens at 0500H. My smart sports watch reads 0438H. Emerging from the shadows of the mango trees fronting the women's...
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...
