three six five ;

 Maybe it wasn’t the froot loops, is what I was told. “No, no. You idiot. You don’t understand. It was a dream.”

“Why are you so upset?”

“She died. And I couldn’t help her.”

“But she was a dream. She isn’t real.”

But the tears were real, as was the grief, as was the loss. I would know; upon waking i tried to hang on to every sliver of my dream self, a man with a hat, weeping over a desk. 

When I realized I wasn’t a man, and that I didn’t own any kind of hat I stopped crying, but the aftertaste of the dream remained, images of a woman on the floor asleep in her own blood. Salt at the edge of the tongue, thickly sour at the back of the mouth. Like a saltwater cave, hollow and dripping lime. The taste of despair? 

Half a blue loop bled into the white of the milk and i tried drowning it with my spoon. The blue must have blended with the milk, who knows if the milk wasn’t white anymore but of a bluish tinge, but I couldn’t see the difference yet. If she wasn’t real then why have I felt so much, too much? 

I couldn’t see the difference yet.

Katrina Del Rosario

We don’t own anything.

Our faces aren’t ours to look at. Our names aren’t ours to call. Our bodies weren’t built for us, but for others to touch, feel, live for, live from. Men were made for women, and women were made for men, puzzle pieces that allow themselves to fit once, only once.

And then we made mirrors. People started touching themselves and pleasuring themselves and calling out their own names and man loved men or men and women, and women loved women or women and men, they all loved both an all and everyone and hated and left whenever they pleased. 

In the end we are all rebels.

Katrina Del Rosario

At first he was thinking how the walls would be clean, the furniture in their places, her body nowhere on the floor had he, last night, held her back. Had he, last night, ran after her. Had he, last night at the very least, taken her home.

They told him she died hours after he put down the phone, hours after she sputtered to him, “I’m sorry, I—I…” Hours after he said, “Look, I don’t know anymore. We’ll see tomorrow.” 

Did she suffer, he asked, and they told him drowning in your own blood was no easy way to go, and he thought, heartbreak isn’t easy for those who remain.

Katrina Del Rosario

Deadliest month of Summer prayer wanes
in full moon, blasting nets of light
glimpsing on the world as a spur

of sunlight dews the nightly cold. In April,
we live by the rule of painting rural ceilings in sky
as the wasps take heed of warmth

blessed in their construction of nests.
Sky, is a blue one fears to condone,
too vast and endless, too beautiful

and senseless while the bees work
in obsession. Light grounds the blessed
beasts to warmth. The heart of a bee,

in a hive, stored in a queen who whispers:
protect me from the enemy my children,
surround them like light, and from light, feed

their wasping heat.

Dominique Santos

 I killed the ants out of trust
that they will never haunt my dreams
unless they were willing to cancel
or wait out on all the other nightmares
waiting in line—

when they go inside that little mound
I know the queen waits in hunger
to be fed – all my candy wrappers scraped

by their little mouths to make royal jelly;
something as sweet and potent for the her
to reproduce. I killed all the ants out of want,

so maybe I can feel like the queen
for a little while. As I impose my reign, I watch
them in their droning little march,

to know where they lived,
and watched closely, savoring
the micro image before pouring

a jar full of gas: setting them aflame
along with dead leaves. Inside

the house, my grandmother complains
why the jar used for iced tea smells
like potential fire – I tell I did

something about the mosquitoes,
an excuse blatantly in cohorts with evenings
to remember all the nightmares to remember

how they will always come –to remember
that I will must smoke the notion out
once in a while.

Dominique Santos

I awoke from chasing tigers to chasing the cold in spaces beneath my pillows, edges of the bed. I kicked off the sheets, my face covered with sweat, sought solace by pressing it against the window. Outside, it is raining. From the corner of my eyes, raindrops against glass looked like a thousand butterflies beating their wings to a rest. I breathe until my head is surrounded with haze, and out of fancy I squeeze my face harder on the surface to see my face at sideways glance, painted with the beyond window view, my own breath as foggy backdrop. But there is no world outside the windows; at least none I knew of. No-World is white and gray. The rain sounds like a louder silence; the calendar stuck on March of last year. Shoes lay with notebooks, strewn across the floor, indifferent to the cold; discarded clothes lay as I left them, keeping the joints of chairs warm. Had I chosen to, I would have lain still and have become included in the room’s secret conference. Had I chosen to, I would have lain still and not gone out to the empty hall, the empty rooms, to see that I am left out of this conversation, uninvited to this grand event. The wall clock is frozen at six; I look under the blankets, pillows, bed for my phone for hopes of telling time but as the search ends in vain, outside, the rain could only fall harder and I, in surrender, could only lie still.

Katrina Del Rosario

April 23. Fell asleep to Bombay Bicycle Club’s Album, flaw. The following dream look and felt like a supernatural version of “Winter’s bone”, spliced with Spike Jonze’s”Where the wild things are.” 

Strange dream. There were was this couple, visiting another couple in a shack in the woods. They’d been having dinner and it was time to go home, and at the door, the visiting couple had  reservations about going home seeing as it was getting dark and so they kept stalling, while the owners of the home insisted that there was nothing to be scared of in the wood and that it was completely safe to travel by moonlight. The woman believed there was some sort of force out in the wood that threatened to kill them. Skip to the morning, we see the man on a university campus. He was joining a group forming outside the library. There was a man with a twig sword (and by sword, I mean, a long one formed by little twigs all magnetized to each other in a loose jointed manner in a zigzag pattern supported by nothing) and had one antennae, similar to that of a  moth, protruding outward from his forehead, longer than his neck. He had a salt and pepper beard, and was surly and angry like a professor would be in a class, He was giving a impassioned, matter of fact speech about the ideology which he followed, which proved to be correct one hundred percent of the time when believed in completely, which, according to him, entailed that they forget about normal logic because this was the new way. the man of the shack was disheveled and clearly something happened to him during the night, but I do not know what.

Josel Nicolas

When he received their letter, he was ecstatic.

The finest Arts School in the city! And they want an interview! The whole week preceding his interview, he worked hard on his paintings, he practiced what he was going to say in the interview.

He will show them that he was the best they had ever seen, in this lifetime and the next. He will be the Van Gogh of the 20th century, the Michelangelo of the modern world.

His paintbrush never went dry in the following days, his fevered excitement showing in his brush strokes, in his pencil sketches. He never stopped for anything, not even when the family upstairs from his apartment made noise. He didn’t stop for food, or water. A fire had been lit inside him, and it was raging.

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“Hello? He He Hello?”

“Stop giggling.” 

“This is a work in progress, bitch!” she shrieks; the shadow of her arms across the pavement are misshapen, octopus flailings in the dank waters of yellow street light. “A step to recovery, a toast to the new. Ah but how weak the light flashes! You’re of no use to me anymore. Die in a ditch.”

“Real mature. How old are you again?”

“Twennyfree,” she blabbers.

“It was rhetorical.” An extension of the L as i put my hands around her neck and she gurgles and hisses and laughs. 

“Fuck this shit,” she spits on the ground. “Fuck you. I’m useless.”

I let her babble. Quarter life crisis, she says. How the hell? Self righteousness is the trend, but nobody could always be right. All rights clash; it was fun to watch. There is entertainment in drunk friends, when every gut wrenching woe, every heartbreak, each sorrow, were the funniest things in the world. 

“Whaswrongwifme? Tell me.” She weeps. 

“You are a child,” I tell her, “and you shouldn’t be drinking.”

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PART ONE: THE WHIRLWIND.

John found himself among the sea of people waiting outside the Mercury Company suite in a building along Ayala Avenue. He was waiting for his name to be called by the HR chief as he was applying for a job as a Marketing Executive. It has been one hour since he came in.

Minutes later, another guy came in. The guy had dark hair, big black eyes, and a charming appearance. He sat a few meters away from John. John kept on looking and looking at the guy who seemed cheerful. His eyelashes were so apparent that John thought that the guy was a man-child.

“John Lennon?” said the HR chief who leaned by the door of the office. John stood up and went inside. 

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 The Stradivari once noted: in thin frail hands —
perfection is an instrument that cascades
belief. In thin frail hands, that dug on steep earth cutting
wood each perfect tone, with a knock and a ring
to build an instrument so useless and so imperfect
that one day the deserving will pulse song
into its longing body. The Stradivari

once noted an ideal perfection in musicality. To turn years
and years of desire to practice and play wordless
emotion on an instrument desired —

with the luthier long gone with his secrets kept,
growing elsewhere in the mountains.

Dominique Santos

“Please,” he said, “let me tell you about rain.”

For a moment I thought he had passed out in his corner, and the silence hung thick over our heads, thicker than the smoke that threatened and succeeded in swallowing us whole. 

“What’s that? Did you say yes, man? Did you…say yes?” He said again and I moved my head to the direction of his voice, imagining that it was connected to a mouth, and that the mouth belonged to a body, and that was him talking from the belly of the beast.

I don’t remember when it started only that it ended so quickly.

“I once had a girl,” he said once, not too long ago in fact, “Or should I say…I had five of her.”

“Dude what?”

“It was like dating five different girls at once. She was…a different person every time.”

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 Once the city took the shape of water
and everything else had no choice
but to succumb. Every building built

that should have stood the test of time
lay suspended in between oceans and
oceans of sleep while humans scurried around,
for higher ground to settle in. Once,

the water in the city took the form of cloud,
and the remaining world, a city once damp,
slowly bloomed into foliage. No one remembered

how the flood had started, no one knew
where their dead had been carried away – in the city,
that once took the shape of water

everything else was left untouched:
plants everywhere, where buildings once stood
the test of time, as did the humans – now

rebuilding themselves to resettle
once more to the thought of a city.

Dominique Santos