Poetry by Jasper Nikki de la Cruz | October 19, 2008
My coffee is slowly losing its warmth,
so I dipped my finger inside the cup.
The coffee’s warmth surrounds my finger,
as if the coffee is breathing on my finger.
I circle my finger around the mouth,
cleaning all the brown-black stains.
Continue reading Coffee
Poetry by Jasper Nikki de la Cruz | October 19, 2008
Eight of us are waiting on a sun-whitened basketball court.
We’ve already warmed up and now we’re getting cold.
The game should’ve started fifteen minutes ago,
and fifteen minutes more, we’ll be winners by default.
The audience is impatiently waiting,
crowding themselves under the acacia tree,
evading the sunbeams from touching their skin,
fanning their faces with brown cardboards.
Continue reading Winners by Default
Poetry by Jasper Nikki de la Cruz | October 19, 2008
Rain like silver threads,
sweeps everything into silence.
Zinc roofs seem to be ripping apart
and the stench of the dogs is illuminated by their dampness.
Flies hovering around
twirling,
wherever my eyes are set.
Frogs are singing along with the raindrops,
raindrops are drumming the leaves of the takip-kuhol.
I watch the children
playing,
running beneath the white curtain of white veil
hanging on a clothesline.
Continue reading Rain
Poetry by Jasper Nikki de la Cruz | October 19, 2008
I want to think of something different,
different that has not been written yet.
Yet once I think about anything,
Anything goes, from birth to death, from there to here,
Here I can only think about everyone,
she, he, they, you, and I.
I want to stop thinking, because it is the same.
Same, like everyone else’s thinking.
Continue reading Anything Goes
Poetry by Kang Kyunhee | October 12, 2008
I’m in a box-like world:
the classroom door,
the white board,
the desks
are all rectangular.
Maybe my heart is also rectangular,
hurting somebody with its four edges.
My notebook,
my ID,
my classmates’ bags
are all rectangular.
Nonfiction by Roselle Jimeno | October 12, 2008
At a certain time when everything seemed to be happening everywhere, except, perhaps the spot where I was—where I gazed, wide-eyed, caught up with the vastness of stagnation and void – there was a particular kind of impulse. It could be moral fiber; but really, it was just a matter of chance.
By chance I became a part of the Disaster Response Team of the Philippine National Red Cross in Davao City in 2006. My high school classmate called on one of those boring days during the semestral break, which I spent over-feeding fishes and coiling in the couch to watch Shrek for the nth time. He invited me for training on Disaster Management. Because I was hungry for something to happen, I was glad to be part of anything that could break my monotonous days. Besides, if there were a gang war in our ghettoized neighborhood in Santo Niño, Matina, I thought I might be able to help. Yet I had never thought I could respond to a disaster with a sense of planning and order. I was one of the most panicky people I knew. Then again, I attended the training despite my father’s displeasure, saying in his coarse voice that I am too frail and small, “basi ikaw pa’y tabangunon.”
The five-day training was attended by undergraduates from different colleges and universities in Davao City. Some of them came in batches of three and five. Almost half of the class were nursing students from Davao Doctors College. There were eighteen trainees and I was the only one who came from the University of the Philippines Mindanao.
Poetry by Macario Tiu | October 12, 2008
Ang dyipni drayber nagdaginot og pasahero
Yawat na lang makabawi kay mahal ang krudo
Ug iyang gipik-ap ang babayeng nagkargag bata
Sa gidiling sona diin naglurat ang dakong karatula
No Parking, No Loading, No Unloading
“Paspas kay dakpon ta,” matod sa drayber
Sa pasaherong nagtinikling sa guot nga sakyanan.
Apan kadakong demalas kay mas naglurat ang mata
Sa polis trapiko ug nasakpan ang drayber sa akto.
“Nganong namik-ap man kag pasahero
Nasayod man kang gidili dinhi kay makalangan sa trapiko?”
Nonfiction by Ricardo de Ungria | October 5, 2008
(Excerpt from Keynote Speech delivered during the Gintong Aklat Awards 2008, SMEX Convention Center, Bay Area, Pasay City)
Recent events in our history, specifically in the past twenty years or so, have more than less convinced me that ours is a culture not of ideas and intellection but of emotions, hints, and suspicions. Our predilection is for the unsaid or the merely implied, the shadowy and adumbrated, the peripheral and the underground as appropriate instruments to counter what has been perceived as the given brutality of power and force exercised by the few oligarchs and pseudo-monarchs in appropriate political positions. The dynamics in our culture is such that there seems to be always an agon between the outer and the inner, between the overt and the secret, the official and the unofficial, mainstream and underground—with the outer and overt and official conceived of as tyrannically powerful and repressive, and the inner and secret and unofficial wielded as a submissive and abiding force whose time will eventually come. Continue reading The Book, the True, and the Beautiful