reinventing rogue realities since 1994.

“Mommy, who’s that?”

Her daughter’s finger was obscuring the face of one of her peers in the class picture—someone with familiar ears. She gently pushed her daughter’s finger aside to reveal a past friend, letting out air in a half-sigh, half-laugh.

“She was my lab partner,” she said simply, “I did okay, but she was the reason why our science teacher gave us hard assignments.”

Her daughter tilted…

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The convenience store just
around the corner calls: its sunlight-
white fluorescent bulbs alluding
to apocalypses in movies. (Maybe
the end is near, but I’m just dropping
by to buy what I need and go.)

Off to the side, a familiar face: smiling
at nothing in particular. (They do that,
promote these things as if convenience
makes me happy.) Celebrities don’t have
time to smile at customers. The…

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Call it whatever
you want to: it’s still
just a spade. (With blood-
stains and the faint wafting
scent of sick.) There is
nothing out of place here.

Why are you crying?
The worst is over: now
we cannot hear the sound
of sirens wailing past.

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The lights in the pub dull
under the influence of sixty-
proof water. Vision blurs
into post-impressionist whorls
of stupor. This is how, it turns
out that the morning arrives:
vague despite the clarity englassed.

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In the morning the street wakes up hungover. The drinks from the night before mingle with lumps of forgotten dinner and flecks of pulutan tossed in acid just off the sidewalks. Stray travelers and first-time residents punctuate the facades of closed establishments, either asleep or needing to be. In an alley between buildings, someone is smoking their last cigarette of the night while waiting for…

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There was a time I was so enamored by the city that I would escape the confines of my room just to experience what I thought back then was beauty. It seemed obligatory, as a pretentious teenager, to go out and get lost as part of a quest to “find myself.” I used to be under the impression that everything would make more sense once I had a sense of self, but somewhere down the line, I figure maybe…

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I was born in the city, and for majority of my life, was also raised in the city. One of my first memories, though, is from a time my family and I lived in the province. Not a province so much as a peri-urban town across the river from an accretion of cities. And not just one city, but they may as well have been the same with the logic founding the streets and the structures.

Up until the age of…

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Turn off the rain, I say, and stay a while. I was referring, of course, to the incessant traffic, the cars that refused to move me to tears. I feared the leaking of the clouds, the loud sound the sky makes when it takes itself too seriously. Stop crying, I reminded myself, trying to stay optimistic about the state of affairs. The wind wears at the windshield, prompting a faint squeaking from the…

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Sometimes in the clutter of my mind, I forget what my voice sounds like, so I interject, mostly to myself, whatever stray syllables congeal upon my tongue. Usually, I am alone, but there are times when group conversations become so overwhelming that impulse takes over, and I can no longer measure sounds. Too loud, too soft, too much something, than what the context calls for. Words can be…

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The world is a small place for billions of people, and life is long enough for repeated encounters with a few who make life that much more meaningful, if at least more tolerable. As a consequence of the perception of time as a linear progression, I used to imagine relationships as the lines of the lives of people intertwining, but I have always questioned such an image. Why is it that some…

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Denouement: an attempt at an aubade

We fucked through midnight, the taste of smoke still at the back of my throat as we were kissing. The airconditioner sighed in the heat, sweat lubricating contact between our skins. You were moaning, and I was breathing all over you, the soft creases of your neck tickling my lips. When you arched, I put my hands under your nape and loin, your breath whispering sex into my ear. Even upon release,…

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I emerge from the crystalline threshold, my eyes dry despite the round liquid mirror somewhere behind me. Looming before me are shimmering translucent shelves vanishing into the atmosphere, each level crowding with tomes of all sizes, dully colored from the abundance of light. Spines out, I make out silver characters in a strange abugida I can only vaguely comprehend.

Walking slowly forward…

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