Princess Creates the Thing

June 12, 1898: an independence both permanent and short-lived amongst the budding and competitive and emerging empires of the West who play the rest of the world like an RPG strategy-based board game. They exchange fire, words, technology, infrastructure, dress, custom, labor, and assert complete influence and ownership. A day to honor a flurry of heroes and a people in a long and complicated battle. I spent the better part of my morning thinking about my grandpa, Agafino, whom I never got the chance to meet (neither my siblings), who served in the US Navy as a cook of various rankings. He was a hot-headed man too who had no qualms about stuffing you and your disobedience in an empty rice sack and tying you to a tree branch. As flawed as I've been told he is, he is still more a mystery, a myth, a laboring body in ships filled with sailors who don't look or speak like him (for the most part). I continually wonder what it was like for him. Was he ever called a "monkey...

Teen drivers be like: Go, go, go… do the jackrabbit start on the count of green of the stoplight tree!

Off-Balanced Legs in Bunches An appetite     for nothing is easy     when you're busy     foraging      on your brain for a day     for the perfect words     for what this "Nothing" is: food. "Nothing" takes all day to make     "Nothing" sits at the table on a holiday     "Nothing" wishes to sit in my stomach I lie     in my bed     like "Nothing" is nothing.     I stand     in the kitchen     off-balanced, bunched up in the legs     like it's nothing I know what I'm doing     like the uptight school binder that I am.     Muscles tingling     cold sweat     the blurriness of vision... My roommate notices nothing. Not me blindly stumbling to the bathroom, trip up and black-out  into the tub like a lazy-dead denim jacket; holding onto nothing ...

A zejel poem. My B-Day: In Which I Give Zero Bleeps About" Ugh, every year there comes that day I continue to age away And everyone's supposed to say That same old buttercream greeting Another year I'm completing It's designed to keep repeating Shouting, "Surprise! Happy birthday!" In the past, there was so much time To celebrate me in my prime Over presents and cake I climb Over fondant hills to my death day Tell me why I should be so glad For future layers of life to add Just to be eaten up? It's sad I'm too busy on my birthday

An ekphrastic poem. Orozco’s "Gods of the Modern World" Beds of knowledge     robes     of fire knowledge dies     over and over and over... in labor     of new knowledge     breaks     encased glass bones     the pages stay     closed watching over another     over and over and over another thick and thin     stories     piled and forgotten histories     darkened and melted     futures in the hands of others     honored or robbed? The robed ones     just stand there while she just lies there faceless.

Triolet: An eight-lined stanza where the first line is also the fourth and seventh while the second line is also the eighth line. A triolet also contains two rhymes (traditionally, ABaAabAB). Triolet of Online Friends We speak in the rhythm of keyboards and keypads ‘til we hear the real thing— voices: squeals and grumbles through cords We speak in the rhythm of keyboards: laughing and crying ‘til we’re bored— Nearly-faceless screen buddies typing We speak in the rhythm of keyboards and keypads ‘til we hear the real thing

More late postings. How to Stop a Protest Using the Jenner-Kardashian Method Slouched against a wall wrapped in a size zero tin foil of sequins, posing like you only got ten minutes of sleep. How dare they steal the gaze off your five-figure photoshoot, hungry for attention. Don’t they see you’re starving? Act interested. Because they can never become you, though they try. But you: a blank canvas;  you blend in easily no matter what. They march, you strut. How easy. It’s only been three minutes. Of all the protests you’ve scrolled past on your timeline, this is the only one you will ever enjoy. Around you, everyone smiles. Everyone dances and makes music and drinks Pepsi. They stop to take selfies. Invite yourself and drop a photo bomb. Not a storefront broken into and not a thing taken. They hold sparklers, not flares. Throw out your blonde wig because dark is in. The black woman to your left is more than happy to keep it for you. Don’t make eye contact as a wom...

Late posting. Didn't wanna go off-prompt. Took a while to think of who to elegize (made that up and I'm using it). Elegy for Mythical Grandpas For the longest time, you thought he was a soldier, a sailor. Nope. Only a sailor’s cook. Didn’t know what he cooked (American?) or where he sailed, didn’t know he had a younger brother, or another family (American, as legend has it) were told he could stuff you in a rice sack and tie you to the branch of a guava tree. For the longest time, you believed he possessed nothing but anger and fear, like a frying pan on fire, maybe having nothing to smile about while being painted (his only existing portrait). Now you try to picture him boldly laughing with babies in his arms; now you try to taste his cooking through your sister’s; now you try to describe all the silver linings growing out of the head of this beast.

Recipe for Trump Tacos 1 hollow tostada wall 2-½ cups of beef (coarse ground) 5 unpresidented heaping tablespoons of salt ⅓ cup of soggy lettuce (as filler) 3oz. finely shredded carrots (old and wrinkled, preferably) ½ cup of chopped, sunburnt tomatoes ⅗ cup of token Black olives (olives matter!) 8oz. shredded yellow cheddar 1 sad tablespoon of sour cream 7 teaspoons of alternative salsa from New York City Best enjoyed alone in a tower

Be-holding the Waters The cactus holds water much like the way camels hold water in their humps and dams and reservoirs hold water and how the moon pulls and pushes the water and the gravity that keeps it all in. We hold water too, keeping it, guarding it, taking our instinctual share. But when we begin to own the water, we own the cactus and the camel and the people. Water adopts our toxicity and so do they. Nothing floods the heart as easily as greed.

I've started working on a Middle Grade urban fantasy/paranormal series-of-sorts that's also semi-autobiographical. It's about a 13 year-old Filipina named Ning Santos who stumbles upon a box of items that belongs to her great-grandpa who died way before her mom was born. The items, such as his anting-anting (amulet), were collected from his US Navy heydays and become a trigger for weird occurrences around town. Throughout her journey, Ning gets to know her past and bridge a cultural gap in a time where the wrong kind of patriotism encourages erasure of ancestral knowledge and wisdom. And I'm just going to drop some  (ok, a lot of) links to the various elements and inspiration behind this series: Fil-Am History 5 Things You Didn't Know About the Watsonville Riots  (dooblydoo contains links to articles) Little Manila: Filipinos in America's Heartland Filipino Americans Discovering Their Past for the Future Acradia Publishing: Filipinos in San Diego Filip...

After ruminating on this new sense of creative energy over the past few months, I thought it fitting to dedicate a blog for it. While my other blog was more fandom-centric, random, and mostly neglected, this one will attempt to be a more organized space for actual work (writing, drawing, and anything creative and related). That's it for now.