Intersectionality, Implication, and Commitment

KARAN

Isa, this is such a bold and grief-stung set. These poems carry the salt and blood of a life lived between queer lineage, colonial wreckage, and climate crisis. They feel oral and ancestral. Let’s begin with “the dresses we lost to storm surge.” That title alone does so much: femininity, memory, loss, ecology, and ocean. Do you write in order to keep secrets, or to confess them?

ISA

I wrote these poems to stand witness to the impact of climate change on my Philippines homeland. A lot of my writing, including this poem, specifically focuses on the impact of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda on my family’s hometown – Tanauan, Leyte – where an estimated two thousand people were killed by the typhoon.

My mother’s lessons and testimonials from surviving the storm serve as a core thread throughout my writing, including the transformation of her relationship with the ocean after the super typhoon. The sea went from a place of healing and ritual in my family to one of loss and displacement. How can we find healing after the storm, when the ocean is now a mass grave of the bodies we never found?

I highlight this shift in my family’s (and my own) relationship to the ocean to complicate the aftermath of major typhoons, to honor the ghosts of Yolanda in my writing, and in hopes to heal my mama’s relationship with the sea.

KARAN

What does your process look like, Isa — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you usually begin, write, and finish a poem? I absolutely love “sea-chorus” and would love for you to walk us through the process of writing that magnificent poem.

ISA

“sea-chorus” is such a special poem to me! I started it during my first-ever residency, through AIR Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. (Much appreciation to friend-mentor-idols Mahogany L. Browne and Sarah Kay for nominating me!) During my month-long residency, I tried to read a book a day #SealeyChallenge. I’ve always been the kind of writer who must be reading rigorously to make room for my own stories. Most of my poems start in the scribbled margins of books I love, pulling ghost lines from the poems that haunt me most.

One book I read that month was “Don’t Call Us Dead” by Danez Smith. A powerful collection – I have always been such a fan of the precision in Danez’ poetry. I read their poem “crown” and was floored; I still remember where I was and how I felt when I first read it. I had never heard of a crown of sonnets before, so I quite literally thought Danez had invented this poetic form – transforming end lines of each sonnet to shift the meaning of the poem.

I knew after that I wanted to attempt a crown myself about super typhoon Yolanda and the ghost stories I hold in the aftermath of that storm and the many that have made landfall since. I decided that each sonnet would represent a different voice – as inspired by the multiple voices Patricia Smith employs in “Blood Dazzler” to show the breadth of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on Black communities across New Orleans. My crown includes the following voices: the typhoon personified (as inspired by Patricia), my mom and titas who survived the storm, and the ghosts buried in the mass graves across our town. The final two stanzas are my own voice, from my experience moving to Tanauan immediately following the typhoon to search for my family. In the final stanza, I challenge myself to write a poem about anything other than the typhoon – a poem where my family never drowned; a poem that my mom would not be scared to read. I hoped to complicate my connection to the stories I was writing, interrogating my role as “insider-outsider” – a mixed race Filipino American who did not personally endure the typhoon, but who lost several family members during the storm and is inextricably tied to this home(land).

I often struggle with knowing when a poem is “finished”. Even with this piece, I contemplated pulling the poem from publication because I thought I needed to do more work to make clear the different voices in each sonnet. But I recently have been influenced by something Nate Marshall said, that putting your work out there (submitting poems, publishing) should be seen as part of the creative process. I’m trying to learn how to be kinder to myself and to my stories. I don’t think writing should feel like punishment, or a cruel labor where I lock myself in a room and demand I produce “capital P” poems. I want my writing to feel like an honoring of myself. I want my poems to be in-progress, imperfect learnings that may never be complete, but are valid in their attempts to witness my peoples and to know myself.

KARAN

“dendrochronology of my queer” reads like a queer ecological record, a love poem across migration, a coming-of-age via plant life. It’s stunning in how it gathers memory through sensory sediment — armpit salt, lemongrass, cockroaches, motel hot tubs, cracked plastic leather. It’s a queer archive built from the intimate and the unspeakable, from inheritance and self-invention. You write: “what if the sky is trans too? / what if each body of water that has found me / is an ancestor who loved the way I do?” How do you think about lineage in relation to queerness — especially when the language or models don’t always exist in the archive?

ISA

Oh dear. Your questions are lovely. Thank you for this witnessing, Karan. I love the framing you offer of my poem as a queer archive, documenting ancestral lineage.

First off, so much appreciation to Shira Erlichman. I wrote “dendrochronology of my queer”, “the dresses we lost to storm surge”, and “on leaving” this past April in her online workshop – In Surreal Life (ISL). Shira and the whole ISL crew invited me to write poems that fed my magic and imagined new worlds and dreamscapes to play in.

This poem was a direct response to one of Shira’s prompts. I imagined listening to the “tracks” of my queerness like counting a tree’s rings. I documented snapshots, moments where I learned my gender, my body. I thought of my partner, who looks up at pink and blue sunsets and announces “the sky is trans”. I thought of little Isa, figuring out my queerness while playing in the sea. I imagined a holy lineage of queer ancestors, reflecting me across space and time – reminding me that I am good and worthy.

KARAN

I was stunned by your poem “‘unfit for human consumption’” — a phrase that echoes across the poem like an indictment. It reminded me also of a poem by Jack Gilbert in which he says: “If children are not starving someplace, they’re starving somewhere else.” You write: “95,472 assorted canned goods / it seems they’d rather fatten the worms…” We can tell this isn’t metaphor. You’re writing at the seam of climate grief and cultural survival, and you do it with astonishing clarity and breath. I don’t have a question, really, just sadness and admiration. Feel free to speak about anything you wish.

ISA

In 2014, the Philippines Commission on Audit (COA) found that P141 million worth of relief goods intended for super typhoon Yolanda victims went undistributed and subsequently expired. In Palo (a neighboring town in my province), the local government buried these goods in secret to cover up their improper handling and distribution. The quote about the government choosing to fatten the worms is what my tita said to me when we first heard the news. She lives in Palo and acutely felt the cruelty of burying relief goods when we were still struggling to recover in the aftermath of the typhoon.

Unfortunately, this manufactured scarcity is borne of the same heartless mechanism we witness across time and place. From the U.S. government’s response to the hurricanes that have battered the southeast to the violent sweeps of Oakland housing encampments, people in need are not met with abundance or care but violent restriction and a dearth of commitment to systemic support.

I am also struck by the echo of this tragedy as we witness the current manufactured starvation of Gaza. This tactic of withholding food and aid as part of the effort to further the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is exceedingly cruel. We must all continue to demand the immediate unblocking of aid and, of course, a free Palestine. From the river to the sea.

KARAN

Your poems are full of hauntings — literal ghosts, as in “tita lynn’s ghost teaches me to tie my shoes,” but also queer hauntings, colonial hauntings, and mythic hauntings, as in the “portrait of the author as aswang.” What’s your relationship to the supernatural — and how does it intersect with gender and inheritance in your work? Do you feel myth allows you to say what realism can’t?

ISA

I grew up with so many ghosts! I played at the local cemetery, and would sleep there all night when I was home for All Soul’s Days. As the youngest in my family, it was always my chore to light the candles and sweep the red ants from my family’s cement coffins. My mom taught me to pray to my ancestors. To ask my lolo for help when I lost something (keys, jewelry, my passport 👀). To call on my uncle to sleep at my feet when I was sick. Our home on Santa Isabel street in Tanauan is a house full of ghosts. Everyone in the neighborhood knows them. They see Tita Lynn standing at our azotea after each storm. If it’s been “too long” since your last visit home, Uncle Eugene will appear to play tricks on you. I was raised by the ghosts in my family too.

After the typhoon, there were so many who died in our town, people began having regular encounters with these “Yolanda spirits” – sightings of wet ghosts walking down our main street; upturned soil at the plaza’s mass grave next to the basketball courts; evenings when neighbors could hear children singing at the elementary school that collapsed during the storm surge.

My goal in writing these poems is to move beyond the literal retelling of any typhoon and to dream new futures outside the realm of climate disaster. I pull from Filipino folklore, legends, the ghost stories I grew up with and the ones I have adopted since. I mythologize those narratives and transform them to reimagine a world in which my family survives the typhoon and our islands do not drown.

KARAN

“bayot” is a word you reclaim — with rage, with tenderness, with political clarity. That poem is equal parts fight and kinship chant. What has it meant for you to claim your own queerness in a diasporic context — and how has that changed your relationship to the page, or to Tagalog, or to your body?

ISA

I came out to my extended family while living in the Philippines in the aftermath of the typhoon. I was nervous to tell my family in the Philippines, because I knew their Catholicism culturally entrenched many of their views on queerness and trans people.

“bayot” is the word for gay in Waray-Waray, my family’s dialect. This poem was about the turmoil I felt when living at home, experiencing so much grief and tragedy from the super typhoon, while also wanting to be seen in my queerness. In the poem, I achieve this witnessing through queer lineage (real and imagined, present and future, queer ancestors). I claim that the ghosts in the ocean see and hold my queer. This visual, of locating safety within my own body while floating in the sea, is an intimate moment of surrendering for me.

There was a time when I thought that my gay poems did not have a place in my developing manuscript, which mostly focuses on the impact of the typhoon. I thought “these are poems that I write for myself, but they will never go anywhere.” One of my collective-mates, Jade, helped me to make the connection and begin to see that my poems about gender and queerness are not separate, but an essential part of my “gesture” in this developing body of work. I now see that my queerness is a vehicle in my poems to articulate, re-mythologize, and grapple with my sense of self amidst the collective trauma of the typhoon, in which I move from witness to active participant in healing.  

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it moving to another direction?

ISA

I love this theory. And I have no idea lol. My non-binary wants to check all the boxes. My romantic Pisces sun feels certain I write poetry of the heart. But I’d like to think I am moving in the direction of poetry of the body.

Before this past spring, it had been about five years of feeling completely disconnected from my writing practice. I was heavily focused on my community organizing (both in my paid and non-paid work), I wasn’t reading poems, and my writing was sparse at best. To make room for what I was holding, I was disconnecting and actively disassociating from my body. I often had little room to remember to feed myself regularly, let alone the space to write poems.

I left my full-time job this past April and have been doing a lot of work to slow and to recognize how uncaringly I treated myself. I want to feel connected to my body. I want my poems to be somatic experiences that I can touch, and remember in my body where I first felt that story.

KARAN

You’ve been writing and organizing for years — and this work shows the labor of both. What advice would you give to younger writers who are trying to hold poetry and justice at once? Alternatively, what is some of the best writing-related advice you’ve so far received?

ISA

I was introduced to poetry my first year at Cal through “Poetry for the People” – a course created by the late June Jordan and taught by Berkeley legend Aya de Leon. We studied the writings of BIPOC poets and learned from the legacy of June Jordan that “poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”

In my most recent “return” to poetry, I’ve realized that writing is how I process the world. It’s how I remember my dreams, how I distill a feeling, how I show up with accountability to my loved ones and aim to be in right relationship. My writing intersects with my organizing simply because my world contains a commitment to the liberation of all peoples. My approach is implicated in this commitment, because I write from that lived experience.

Something I took from Shira (link again to her ISL class!) is that when writing about violence in the world, our approach must be implicated: “If it is from above, it is the same as a drone. The same as surveillance.”

That is my advice to younger writers – to implicate your worlds. Then write from that place. Become inherently committed to the work of liberation, both dismantling that which does not serve us and helping build safety and freedom – whether that be abolishing ICE, the fight for a free Palestine, the seeding of disability justice, the building of trans futures. Your commitment to these movements as an artist must be deeper than any poem alone you could write. Without that – our words are a performance.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

ISA

“Ghostlines” is the name of my art collective (or more accurately, my gathering of the sweetest best friends - Ari, Gabriel, Jade, and Natasha). We chose this name because 1) we all have a shared connection to ghosts and 2) in reference to the “ghost line” – a writing prompt that offers the first line of a poem as a starting place for a free write. I offer these weird prompts from, for, or inspired by them.

1) (after Gabriel) Write a poem comprised entirely of questions to a ghost in your life. This ghost could be an ancestor, a spirit you feel or wish you felt more connected to, or even an object/inheritance (e.g. my lolo’s big ears that wiggle when I anger). Place the poem as an offering at your altar.

• Ghostline: If I could know one thing, I would ask you:
• Inspiration: Read this essay by Bay Area poet Sarah O’Neal and pay attention to the questions she asks of her Baba.

2) (after Ari) Take a pen and write directly onto your body, mapping the (true or imagined) origin stories of your scars, bruises, stretch marks, birth marks, tattoos. What meaning do these marks hold for you? What portals do they open?

• Ghostline: My body remembers…

3) (after Natasha) If you don’t already – keep a dream log for a month (or forever). It can be written into your phone, a handwritten journal, or even recorded as a voice note – but record your dreams as soon as you wake up with as much detail as possible. Pull the symbols, images, and quotes from a recent dream (or stitch together up to 3). Use these details to write a poem, placed in this fantastical world. Aim for it to be more “strange spell” than linear or sensical.  

• Ghostline: In my dream, I remember…
• Inspiration: One of my favorite poems, that I think of quite often, is actually the end to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib from back in 2016. Hanif shares about a dream he had of his mother: “I was at the edge of what I imagine was the Scioto River, which runs through Columbus, Ohio, where I'm from. And all of the fish, when they opened their mouths, had my mother's laugh. All of them leapt from the water, and her bright head scarves trailed them. And as they gathered en masse at the riverbank, I woke up.” In all my poetry, I hope to hold my dreams and loved ones with this same tender.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art — a painting, a film, a song, etc (something other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or has long haunted your imagination.

ISA

I think I may watch too much Drag Race for this question, because that’s the first thing that comes to mind! But earlier this year, my partner took me to see ASOG – a film about the aftermath of Yolanda. The cast are all survivors of the super typhoon, and I more than likely cried when I heard Waray spoken on the screen. One of the main characters, Jaya, is a trans woman looking to compete in her first drag pageant. The film is hilarious, haunting, campy, and provides sharp analysis – calling out the land-grabs by corporate real-estate developers, displacing survivors to build resorts on their lands post-typhoon. The film ends with an elder explaining the meaning of the term “asog” and the significance of these respected, feminine, gender-bending healers in Philippine history. If you have a chance to see a screening (or buy/rent here), please support!

P.S. Another tender moment from this film: The creators shared this behind-the-scenes post on IG, where one of the extras asks Jaya to teach her trans daughter to put on make up. They stop production so Jaya can give an impromptu makeup tutorial to the young girl on the Jeepney where they were filming. My heart.

KARAN

And finally, which poets have most shaped your sense of voice, lineage, or permission?

ISA

Safia Elhillo is my favorite poet. I wrote so many poems in the margins of her chapbook “Asmarani” (which later became her first full-length “January Children”). Her writings on diaspora and the multitudes of home grip me from my core. And I feel it here [clutches chest, dramatically signaling an “on fire” sensation]. How lucky are we, to be poets at the time of Safia.
Other favorite writers! June Jordan (no poet has altered my life more), Patricia Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Hala Alyan, Hanif Abdurraqib, Shira Erlichman, Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, sam sax (another friend-mentor-idol), Jade Cho (a student of the archive and favorite keeper of my first drafts), Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Merlie Alunan and most recently Tiana Clark. I read Tiana’s book “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood” and oh my. I was outside of a gristmill-turned-bookstore in Western Massachusetts when I read one of her poems out loud to friends – “800 Days: Libation,” for Kalief Browder. When I spoke the last line, it immediately started to rain. The wind opened my journal and flew one of my poems into the river. I think all my favorite poets are conjurers of truth and magic. And I am a more honest writer because at some point in my life, I sat somewhere, tenderly with their stories, and opened.

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