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

Defiance will carry me through my last days, Amidst the terror of the night, over the coastal waters of Cavite

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

Perhaps the greatest hold Valmidiano has on the reader is through collective memory and experience.

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

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.

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

the showers are too weak in our new house, or else I am too weak, letting water pass right through me

conjuring the Sahara in our orange hallways & together trekking across those impossible sands.

Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat takes an unflinching look at the racist legacy.

It has been three seasons since I last saw you, she hums. I was beginning to forget your face.

I’m running out of options. because I like the impossible sound of a typing speed that isn’t going anywhere.

& her handshake is an embrace. The second mystery is that she smiles the vowels of my name

It’s not yours until you bleed on it, until it tastes the kiss of Vancouver rain

My lola is the kind of person to rise earlier than the sun

Maybe that’s one reason why translation is not much-practiced in the Philippines