Isang Araw : Pompano Baked Nightfall

skin fried and simmering / sweet solitude in the sorrowful / of tropicana
palm leaf rafts tutting forward in rippling streams / what is idyllic
is idyllic is idyllic in the unimaginable / hopestress hoping for the ideal
delineation of a language born and bent across salted bodies
too deep to fit its own name in the mouth / gulping down pebbles
slick with laway and tubig / threadhues woven to mean something / rising
into mountains first in hiding then with incandescence / riddled with songs
strung / capillaric heartpounds / each moment erupting forth
from the once dormant diaphragm bowl of arrozcaldo / downward
the two navels / baring each broken rib to the stars / surrendering
the spinning typhoon of history / the history of people / the people who lay
backside to the bamboo raft looking up and out, out, out . . .

Danielle Garcia Tubo is a Filipino American poet, writer, visual artist, and educator. Garcia Tubo explores questions and issues of diasporic Filipino identity and migrant life in the United States, intervening in these colonial and imperial legacies by activating Philippine archive, history, and languages; challenging systems of U.S. administrative violence; and championing love across distance, time, and memory. Garcia Tubo holds a BA in Art History from the University of Florida and is currently an Image Text MFA candidate at Cornell University. Garcia Tubo is based in Queens and can be found on Instagram @dlbgarcia.