In the series Custody of the Tongue, intimate, videos capture acts of binding, veiling, and consuming, each serving as my confessions, my acts of contrition, my penance, blurring the lines between devotion and indulgence, reminders of the consuming nature of desires. This tension reveals the complexity of love and sexuality through the lens of Catholic identity, where the body is both celebrated and shamed.
Read Morein the hospital with me there was a tall blonde boy with angry scrapes on the back of his neck, sockless in his institutional orange sandals. he walked laps around the halls, the skin of his feet opening to the unforgiving plastic. when i suggested socks, another patient suggested that i was witnessing organic harm reduction. there was wisdom in that blistering walk & it was not cure.
Read MoreUmmi wants you to look your best. She's rented the habit from a professional costume store and even bought you the sheer black tights from the French lingerie shop you still blush to go inside…
Read MoreAmerica’s sticky Grapes of wrath,
fingers, linger, coddled by broken
tracing constraints thumbs, yearn
I’m a bony brown girl, tipping absolutely NO scales with my forty-four pound body at ten years old. Fifth grade is when my hips spurted out a teense and I grew a whisper-and-a-half taller. Ah, but that height promotion graduated me from a kiddie banana seat bike to a woman’s adult bike. I wobble and tippie toe to balance the bigger wheels and frame. The most important thing? I now pedal alongside my Ateh Elise’s (elder sister) biker ‘gang’ of other 7th grade Filipino teens. I am not-at-all ready for womanhood in my mom-run-fundie Christian home, but here in America, this ten speed, one-track mind bike popped my cherry…
Read Moreit had to do with units
of time of squares of dollars
of birth orders of birds migrating
