Bringing the Doll

By Merlie M. Alunan

Two dolls in rags and tatters, one missing an arm and a leg, the other blind in one eye—

I grabbed them from her arms, “No,” I said, “they cannot come.”

Each tight baggage I had packed only for the barest need:

no room for sentiment or memory to clutter with loose ends my stern resolve.

I reasoned, even a child must learn she cannot take what must be left behind.

And so the boat turned seaward, a smart wind blowing dry the stealthy tears I could not wipe.

Then I saw—rags, tatters and all— there among the neat trim packs, the dolls I ruled to leave behind.

Her silence should have warned me she knew her burdens as I knew mine:

her clean white years unlived— and paid my price.

She battened on a truth she knew I too must own:

when what’s at stake is loyalty or love,

hers are the true rights.

Her own faiths she must keep, not I.

The Book of Embraces
by Gemino Abad

I’m vexed with myself tonight

that I, fitful tiller of words,
cannot write you a poem,
warm as your ironing-board,
well-shaped like your finest vase,
which should tell everlastingly your truth
clear like any ordinary morning
when the smog lifts to wide-open skies.
What is your truth, or what is love?
Where you move without ripple in my blood,
there the clods of deep little hurts –
oh, forgiven, nameless in memory,
and yet, without my conscious intent,
let to grow like thorny touch-me-nots
and rankly creep with tiny purple eyes
to demean me darkly in my sight.
How their bramble cut my soul
where I would not look to save myself!
Why do I struggle toward your truth?
Where words and words swirl about,
dust in my speech, without power
to trace their meaning in my blood,
I coax like a conscientious gardener
from dead clods their hurtful bloom,
then look upon my soul’s wildness
that you had loved, and strain
from our days’ erasure of worship,
syllable by syllable,
the struck bliss and dazzle
of our secret ‘book of embraces.’
DREAMWEAVERS by Marjorie Evasco

We are entitled to our own

Definitions of the worlds
We have in common:

Earth house (stay)

Water well (carry)
Fire stove (tend)
Air song (sigh)
Ether dream (die)

And try out new combinations With key words Unlocking power:
House on fire sing!
Stove under water stay,
Earth filled well die.

The spells and spellings

Of our vocabularies
Are oracular
In translation

One woman in Pagnito-an

Another in Solentiname
Still another in Harxheim
And many other women
Naming
Half the world together

Can move their earth

Must house their fire
Be water to their song
Will their dreams well.
Short Time

by Jaime An Lim

I am haunted by the sadness of men

hanging out at night

in all the parks and alleys of the world.

They wait and meander

weighing

measuring

the safer distance

between dread

and desire.

Every face a catalog of possibilities,

every look a whole vocabulary of need.

Tonight, you are the dream

who walks in my waking sleep,

who bears miraculously

the shape voice motion of remembered love.

How can I resist the reckless

Leap from the world

of furtive brushes

and tunnelling headlights

to this room, no less anonymous,

of thin walls, thinning mattresses

where we grapple and thrash

like beached sea creatures

breathing the dry unfamiliar air?

When you stand to go, I ease myself

into the hollow your body leaves.

I press the faint smell of you to my face

O Christ, were I loving you

drinking your blood, eating your flesh!

But the morning betrays nothing.

The chair in the corner stands mute,

the mirror repeats your absence.

When the curtains are flung back

to let the harsh light in,

the bed looms empty.

I am finally all I have.