"Into the Land of Forsaken Promises" by Filipino Artist Don Bryan Bunag
(winner of Water Media on Paper Category 2015 MADE)

i.

and she was named after a typhoon -- to constantly remind her parents that yes, one night in the evacuation center they forgave wetness and braised, embraced. La Nina, El Nino. They held each other as violent as an infant's first fist. Close, Open, Close, Open. Their cry, the first wreckage that only broke breath, then broke nothing 

because promises are meant to be broken. the local government unit consoled. as from afar they watched trucks lying on their sides, bellies ripped open. the herd growling against themselves, stuffing their mouths with whatever tin can and instant noodle they could find

and she had to beat her heart. and her mother craved. and together they learned the distance between omnivores and scavengers. between human and human. 

ii.

tell me what it is like to be verbless. 

tell me, what is it like to feed on the very umbilical that forced a mother to feed on another. 

tell me it is for this alone and nothing else. tell me that she did not enjoy it. tell me that hunger is for everyone. tell me that there are no exceptions. tell me that there are no exceptions. tell me that there are no exceptions. tell me that there are noexceptionsnoexceptions. tell me. that everyone grows because of hunger alone. 

iii.

and before she could speak. before syllable. before stretch-mark. before swollen before dilation before throughout before fall before cry before crawl before gender before names -- they called her 'parasite'.
  
iv.

in the stillness of rehabilitation, a shack grows from multiple donations. as though a homunculus, bred from organs given by country and country and country, never their own.

it had a ceiling that listened to the battle-cry of each raindrop. took its ripple and gossiped it across the single-room furnished only by three bodies. one body had yet to hear the sound of battering, but already learned how to keep one's eyes shut. 

she could not see the sack of rice whose lips have begun to swell. has begun to swallow itself. 
she could not see the makeshift pot encrusted by yesterday's rice-milk. breastfed on by rats who have lost their mothers.
she could not see the alibi her father would use time and time again. how it was too cold. how friction must. how it must. how it is just. and her mother knew it was just.

they say "habang maikli ang kumot, matutong mamaluktot" but her father must not have heard it well.
rather than mamaluktot he must've heard mamalikot. 

and he mamalikot her mother. for friction. for heat. for everything he could not eat and drink. nourished. the way a tree allows its fruits to fall inches above its roots. distance enough for anything to rot, to give and give and hollow. 

artwork by Elicia Edijanto

"...I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can

chart me. All the other planets, they think

I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped

moon, running free...

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.

I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids

in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:

wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.

They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other

planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like

a motherfucker."

                      --- Pluto Shits on the Universe by Fatimah Asghar

"They have EKG’d her cold-blooded heartbeat, MRI’d

and scanned, her silhouette glowing with radiation.

Surgeons in white deftly wield gleaming scalpels.

They have stitched her gills shut, and scraped the

barnacles from her shoulder blades. Round, puckered

scars remain, in the spot where earlier that morning,

an angel had her wings removed. "

                      ---The Mermaid by Jessica Goody

"you reached into my memory by placing a finger
in my ear. I placed a hand

in your mouth to catch the bird

and we smashed it

together."

                      --- There Is a Bird in My Mouth by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

"I cannot say that I understand the valley

understand the petal-like, windborne unfolding of her confession

full moon night         in the underbrush, ladybugs flutter

like the grains of stars       falling into the valley’s wet creases

someone says: the full moon can trigger a kind of savage snow...

                      --- The Full Moon Night by Ya Shi trans. by Nick Admussen



          "You move through me like rain heard
from another country.
                           Yes, you have a country.
                                       Someday, they will find it
while searching for lost ships . . . " 

                      --- To My Father / To My Unborn Son by Ocean Vuong



"Our tongues not content
inside our bodies, we longed to possess
even the other, possess them so long
as their suffering was not ours, and when they began
to shed their names by themselves, we invented
new ones; when they began to hurt us we broke them
down into more names"

                      --- As Adam by Mikael de Lara Co

artwork by Leslie Ann O'Dell

Let me show you -- beneath these lips are small pieces of iron giving refuge to oxygen. Hinged arms, could barely accommodate. Hear it rusting. This beautiful corrosion, I blush, and keep on blushing. Call me haunted. And take away my name by surrounding me with too little, (via osmosis) it escapes. Then fill and refill me. Give me more and then some. Use those lips to talk dirty -- say my name, Beak, Pitcher, River --  let me be all kinds of mouth all at once. Perhaps I can speak a language you'd understand. See my word, outlined in the gospel-crust of my cratered lips -- I've been waiting for you for so long, please arrive. And keep arriving.

photo by Daria Endresen

Because even heaven broke by this light, this light that now breaks just from my standing. Its blood, this black wedding veil that stretches far from my fingers' reach. Scratches the barest varnish of concrete. What it tries to hide, is beyond me. I could not be the bride and the bride's maid. Be the pressure and the blood. Be the gradient and the breath. Every day I walk down an aisle drowning in pressed flowers, waiting for a groom at the end of this street, this dingy alley, this final vertebra of escalator, to find no one. His body and His blood on that altar curdles and ferments. Lose faith, earn flavor. The soles of my feet could feel the closeness of this land mine. Perhaps in another distance. Not here. In another direction. Not there. A land to claim, to colonize, to terrorize, to divest, digest and hollow out. A land once mined, a land mine'd, might also break. Hold him, hold her, and the entirety of their heat and glacier, and let their sand fall down my arms. Become desert enough to hold me. Stained glass beneath my feet. With a reflection to call a lover. 

photo from 'Sleeping Beasts' by Dara Scully

Our overture was the static from the earphone that dangled loosely on my right ear. Champ Lui Pio's breathy voice bristling through the cracked ribs of its wiring. Be it copper, alloy, steel, it was soft and complacent, lying like an abused bride within the plastic insulation.  I was lost in its circulation -- to a point that even the headlights felt lost in me. And maybe, for a moment, I became indivisible from the periphery, from motion parallax, from the musk of honks and absinthe of traffic. Then his fingers came, searching, slender but uncertain. How many times have I seen this gesture? How many times have I made it? Curled my fingers as if embryonic, seeking refuge, desperately clutching the coins waiting for someone else to take this leap of faith and take take take it from me. My palm immediately readied to cradle, my eyes parametizing the curve of his hand -- from wrist to finger. Tracing. Connecting each frail, beautiful dot. Rather than thinking it was the hand of a musician, I thought they belonged to a poet. Much more eager, more devastating. Those slight indentations at the tip of his fingers, like leaf scars, could be from a lead pencil or a pen held too long. A word held too long. Words stripped and redressed of meaning. I wondered the many things they could do. Both clean and dirty. Pagpuyo girl (Calm it, girl) -- was what I thought, after watching him through the slightly oiled corner of my eye. The slight cant of his eyes, owing to a Chinese heritage, that was slowly covered by a pair of black rectangular spectacles. I don't know why I watched you. I don't know why. I don't know why I watched you leave the jeepney and memorized the sight of the night taking you in. For refuge? Respite? Where will it take you? Deeper? Higher? I don't know why I felt like someone beneath an ocean, watching at someone's half-body stroke the water to keep his breathing. And I almost opened my mouth about to speak to you, once or twice, throughout that long ride from Roxas to Ulas -- wanting to ask if it would be alright, to pretend to drown? But the ocean would try to get in, fill me with its brackish meat. Because I never met you, I love you. Beware how much I love you and let me hold onto this warmth, till it calcifies. 

"The Great Wall of Vagina" by Jamie McCartney

"The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.” 

                                                             --- from Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

"I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.” 

                                                             --- from We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change its shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remeber.” 

                                                             --- from The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

To Be a Woman is to Live in a Time of War

by Joi Barrios

To be a woman 

Is to live at a time of war.

I grew up 

with fear beside me,

uncertain of a future,

hinged to the men of my life;

father, brother,

husband, son.

I was afraid to be alone.

To be a mother 

Is to look at poverty at its face.

For the cruelty of war

Lies not on heads that roll,

But tables always empty.

How does one look for food for the eldest

As a baby sucks at one’s breast?

No moment is without danger.

In one’s own home,

To speak, to defy

Is to challenge violence itself.

In the streets,

Walking at nightfall

Is to invite a stranger’s attack.

In my country

To fight against oppression

Is to lay down one’s life for the struggle.

I seek to know this war.

To be a woman is a never ceasing battle

To live and be free."

'The Inevitability of Time' by Adam Martinakis

          "...If she is the sound, if it isn’t

essential until its lack. If she is

the sound of. Waves. If in the body,

the dew in morning, and the moon.

If she is the sound of the water.

If rising, if breaking, if throughout."

                      --- Elegy in Limestone by CJ Evans

"...Ang babae ay hindi karneng  

dinuduro at kinikilo, 

ginigisa ang laman sa iyong mga pangako, 

nilalaga ang buto sa iyong pagsuyo 

at ginagawang chicharon ang balat 

upang maging pulutan."

                     --- Kasalo by Joi Barrios

"I think, Dear God, and remember  

there are stars we haven’t heard from yet: 

They have so far to arrive. Amen,  

I think, and I feel almost comforted."

                     --- The Hammock by Li-Young Lee

"Though they cannot be deciphered, 

cannot become lighter, 

all moments will shine 

if you cut them open, 

glisten like entrails in the sun."

                     --- As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud by Sara Eliza Johnson