I was never Filipino to them, just someone who belonged to everyone else.

i wish for a universe that is not so delicate i cannot cope if it slips through my fingers if i shatter in every alternate timeline tell me

my grandmother does not know how to forget she has taught my mother the same reminiscence has learned to worship grief

What was the summer if it wasn't for us?

Wildflowers grow through the cracked mouth of the parking lot where I had my first kiss

and you’re crying in them. you were always crying back then, but you don’t remember anymore

let's drive until we reach Tagaytay. Drink coffee overlooking the Taal Lake. And imagine there’s no such thing as a pandemic.

I want you to be like me. I want you to have reasons to live.

Gharib shares her honest experiences of being caught between her Filipino and Egyptian identities

or his throat, or his lungs, or his song, his body now gills all over, now there, all the way over there beyond this

the spaghetti tastes jollier when it costs a six-and-a-half hour drive to jacksonville, florida, the closest home of jolly spaghetti

Samantha Garner is a Canadian SF/F author living in the Greater Toronto Area.

Garner is a biracial Filipina-Canadian living in the Greater Toronto area.

there's a layer of dust on my crocodile skin i've been in southern california so long the hawk cuts an arc in the sky and agrees

We watch the house wrap itself around her. Light and heat return to the earth.

i am allowed to be both a rose and its thorns, a work of art and the glass that encases it, all at once

I am a daughter of the Diaspora The blanket woven by my motherland Adorns us each in gold

Claustrophobia comes at me in moments between dusk and nightfall.

We look up at the sky and see blue; uninterrupted and no one tells us we need to step out of the sun our skin a cloudless glow, we stretch

I haven’t figured out what good parenting looks like maybe a dollar to not skip class two