Four Poems by Luisa Igloria That Appeared in The Missouri Review

These four poems by Luisa Igloria appeared in The Missouri Review: Editors' Prize Issue (Volume XXVII, Number 1, 2004). The Missouri Review is a literary journal published by the College of Arts & Science of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The short bio of Igloria that accompanied her published poems in the journal: "Luisa Igloria is a poet, fiction writer and essayist who has published five books under the name Maria Luisa Aguilar Carino. She is the editor of the new anthology Not Home, but Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora (Anvil, 2003). Luisa's work has appeared in numerous national and international journals."

The poems:
1. Field Planted to Winter Grass
2. The Return
3. Trill and Mordent
4. Mandorla

Carlos A. Angeles Biography and Literary Works (Poems)

- Carlos A. Angeles was a Filipino poet. He was born on May 25, 1921 in Tacloban City in the province of Leyte. He attained secondary education at Rizal High and graduated in 1938. He attended several universities - Ateneo de Manila, University of the Philippines, and Central Luzon Colleges. When he was studying in UP, he became an active member of the UP Writer's Club. His award-winning poetry collection, A Stun of Jewels, was published to great acclaim in 1963. Another collection, A Bruise of Ahses, was published by the Ateneo University Press in 1993.

- Angeles worked at the Philippine Bureau of International News Service from 1950 to 1958.

- Angeles was a recipient of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in the Poetry category in 1964. This was the year that poetry was added to the list of categories. Angeles won the award for A Stun of Jewels, a collection of 47 poems. These were poems he wrote and dedicated to his wife Concepcion Reynoso. The collection also won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.

Poems:
1. Gabu
2. Dusk
3. Landscape II
4. Badoc
5. Family Reunion
6. The Wonderful Machine
7. From the Rooftop

A Bruise of Ashes: Collected Poems by Carlos A. Angeles.

Luisa A. Igloria Biography and Literary Works (Poems)

Luisa A. Igloria is a Filipino-American poet. She authored 14 books of poetry and 4 chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in national and international anthologies, and print and online literary journals including Orion, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diode, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry, Shanghai Literary Review, Cha, Hotel Amerika, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She was director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Old Dominion University from 2009 to 2015.

Education:
1. B.A. Humanities - Cum Laude - major in Comparative Literature, minor in English, cognate in Philosophy), 1980 University of the Philippines Baguio
2. M.A. in Literature at Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, Philippines, 1988 [Robert Southwell Fellow]
3. Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing, University of Illinois at Chicago, July 1995 as Fulbright Fellow.

Awards and Recognitions:
1. Co-winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Open competition. (2019)
2. Appointed as the 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022)
3. Inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK). (2015)
4. Recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. (2018)
5. May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press (2014)
6. She was the inaugural Glasgow Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. (2018)
7. Second Prize at the Bridport Poetry Prize/UK. (2018)
8. Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize (2009)
9. 49th Parallel Poetry Prize (2007)
10. James Hearst Poetry Prize (2007)
11. Honorable Mention in the Potomac Review Poetry Contest (2010)
12. Finalist in the first Narrative Poetry Contest (2009)

Poetry Collections:
1. Maps for Migrants and Ghosts
2. What Is Left of Wings, I Ask
3. The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis
4. Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
5. Juan Luna's Revolver

Trivia:
1. Since November of 2010, Igloria has been writing at least one poem a day.
2. She has a website at http://www.luisaigloria.com/.

Poems:

1. Mandorla

2. Trill and Mordent

3. The Return

4. Field Planted to Winter Grass

Edith L. Tiempo Biography and Literary of Works (Poems, Novels, Short Stories)

Edith Lopez Tiempo was a Filipino poet, short story writer, literary critic, novelist, and teacher. She was born on April 22, 1919 in San Nicholas, Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya. Her parents were Salvador T. Lopez, an auditor for the government and Teresa Cutaran. She studied and earned a degree from Silliman University. She took the course Bachelor of Science in Education. She majored in English. She graduated magna cum laude in 1947. 

Tiempo took her Masters Degree at the University of Iowa. At the university, she was the recipient of an international fellowship that lasted from 1947 to 1950. In 1958, Tiempo received a scholarship grant from the United Board of Christian Higher Education in Asia and she used it to get a doctorate degree in the English language at the University of Denver in Colorado.

She was conferred a National Artist for Literature in 1999. In 1962, along with her husband Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo, they founded the Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City. Tiempo received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the State University of Iowa in the United States. She also held a Ph. D. from the University of Denver.

In 1979, Tiempo's novel His Native Coast won first prize at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Novel. In 1988, she and her husband received the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas (UMPIL Award/Balagtas Bicentennial National Achievement Literary Award). Tiempo has also won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Poetry and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Short Story. He won multiple times (1951, 1955, 1967, and 1969). In 1955 and 1959, Tiempo won the Philippines Free Press Short Story Contest.

In 2002, the Ateneo de Manila University honored Tiempo with its Tanglaw ng Lahi Award. The university gave her the award "for a vision that has supported the institutional practice of creative writing in the Philippines". 

In 2019, in celebration of the centenary of Tiempo's birth, the Philippine Postal Corporation printed and released 25,000 commemorative postage stamps bearing the image of Tiempo.

In August, 2020, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the University of Santo Tomas Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies organized a special webinar called Manila Reads Edith Tiempo. As part of the event, Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo delivered a lecture titled Women and Power in Edith Tiempo's Fiction. 

She is acknowledged by some as the Mother of Philippine Literature. Tiempo died on August 21, 2011. Cause of death was myocardial infarction.

Poetry Collections:
1. The Tracks of Babylon and Other Poems (1966)
2. Beyond, Extensions (1993)
3. The Charmer's Box and Other Poems (1993)
4. Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (2010)

5. Commend Contend/Beyond Extensions (2010)

Writing Guides:

1. Six Uses of Fictional Symbols (2004)

2. Six Poetry Formats and the Transforming Image (2008)

Novels:
1. A Blade of Fern (1978)
2. His Native Coast (1979)
3. Alien Corn (1992)
4. One, Tilting Leaves (1995)
5. The Builder (2004)
6. The Jumong (2006)

Short Story Collections:
1. Abide, Joshua, and Other Stories (1964)

Poems:

1. Lament for the Littlest Fellow

2. Bonsai

Short Stories:

1. The Corral

2. The Black Monkey

Poems by Angela C. Manalang Gloria

Paradox

The things I planned and wanted so
Held off my bidding like a foe:
A past, white feathers in my hair,
Applause, a scandalous affair.
The things I did not want at all
Now hold my body to my soul:
Conscience, an empty diary,
A son, and self-sufficiency.
Having the things that passed me by
Would I be nearer to the sky?
And stripped of all that I now have,
Would I be farther from the grave?

***

Soledad

It was a sacrilege, the neighbors cried,
The way she shattered every mullioned pane
To let a firebrand in. They tried in vain
To understand how one so carved from pride
And glassed in dream could have so flung aside
Her graven days, or why she dared profane
The bread and wine of life for some insane
Moment with him. The scandal never died.

But no one guessed that loveliness would claim
Her soul’s cathedral burned by his desires
Or that he left her aureoled in flame…
And seeing nothing but her blackened spires,
The town condemned this girl who loved too well
and found her heaven in the depths of hell.

***

Revolt from Hymen

O to be free at last, to sleep at last
As infants sleep within the womb of rest!

To stir and stirring find no blackness vast
With passion weighted down upon the breast,

To turn the face this way and that and feel
No kisses festering on it like sores,

To be alone at last, broken the seal
That marks the flesh no better than a whore’s!

***

To the Man I Married

I
You are my earth and all the earth implies:
The gravity that ballasts me in space,
The air I breathe, the land that stills my cries
For food and shelter against devouring days.
You are the earth whose orbit marks my way
And sets my north and south, my east and west,
You are the final, elemented clay
The driven heart must turn to for its rest.

If in your arms that hold me now so near
I lift my keening thoughts to Helicon
As trees long rooted to the earth uprear
Their quickening leaves and flowers to the sun,
You who are earth, O never doubt that I
Need you no less because I need the sky!

II
I can not love you with a love
That outcompares the boundless sea,
For that were false, as no such love
And no such ocean can ever be.

But I can love you with a love
As finite as the wave that dies
And dying holds from crest to crest
The blue of everlasting skies.

***

Querida

The door is closed, the curtains drawn within
One room, a brilliant question mark of light…
Outside her gate an empty limousine
Waits in the brimming emptiness of night.

***

To Don Juan

It was not love-why should I love you?-
It was not folly, for I was wise,
Yet when you looked at me, your looking
Opened a kingdom to my eyes,

It was not love, it was not folly,
I have no name to know it by,
I only know one shining instant
You held my earth, you held my sky.

***

To a Lost One

I shall haunt you, O my lost one, as the twilight
Haunts a grieving bamboo trail,
And your dreams will linger strangely with the music
Of a phantom lover’s tale

You shall not forget, for I am past forgetting
I shall come to you again
With the starlight, and the scent of wild champakas,
And the melody of rain.

You shall not forget. Dusk will peer into your
Window, tragic-eyed and still,
And unbidden startle you into remembrance
With its hand upon the sill.

***

May

April came and April went
Through a magic crystal weather.
Now with mischievous intent
Pan and I will walk together.
Lean and hold your breath and say
Softly from a jasmine bower,
"We have caught the fairy may
Can't you see her in this flower?"

***

Words

I never meant the words I said,
So trouble not your honest head
And never mean the words I write,
But come and kiss me now goodnight.

The words I said break with the thunder
Of billows surging into spray:
Unfathomed depths withhold the wonder
Of all the words I never say.

Poems by Simeon Dumdum Jr.

On the Death of a Five-Year-Old

You'll need a board, one-by-eight-by-twenty,

A hammer, a saw.

To start,

Hold a thread on the child, vertically

For length, the shoulders for width.

Saw off the board on two benches to get

The back, the sides, the lid.

Put together with a handful of nails.

You haven't planed, or painted, or cut

Any edge - 

No coffin is ever a work of art.

***

Upon Seeing a Couple Kiss While I Am Taking Coffee Near the Airport

What if no one witnessed the couple’s quick kiss?
What if I was not in the coffee shop now,
Having cappuccino alone and gazing at those who pass by?

Coincidences mark the imprint of this hour.
Whether they be casual or one of great weight,
How could I tell? Only the kissers knew the import of their kiss.

Kisses I have known (and among them were yours,
I recall one when we were going upstairs,
That’s another story, however youthful, honest, a pure joy—

As I think all kisses must be if done here,
At a coffee shop just beside the airport).
Well, to them, the kissers, I raise this cup of coffee and my heart.

***

How I Want Picasso to Sketch Me

This is how Pablo Picasso
sketched Ella Fitzgerald.
Her breasts like the waves of Hokusai,
hair a cluster of grapes.
She tilts her head upwards
the way singers do
when belting a high note.
And the song that comes out of her mouth
is like cotton candy.
That’s Ella—pour Ella Fitzgerald,
Son ami, signed, Picasso.

This is how I want Picasso
to sketch me, chest flat, like the Shield
of Achilles but with no design,
a flat cap on my head,
eyes raised but wearing glasses,
lips slightly open,
a thought bubble above me
like a growing rain cloud,
and if he cannot make the sketch
(not the least because he is dead),
I can very well do it myself.
In grade school I was doing sketches
like that which he made of Ella,
but I am poor in forging signatures
and do not know French.

***

The First to Love

Always she is a step ahead.
When I think of giving her flowers,
She waylays me with wine-red roses.
And if I get up in the morning,
Pulled out of bed by the idea
Of a long walk across the fields,
She would be there, lacing her shoes,
The coffee, which was on my mind,
Filling up the room with its presence.
But one day, when there was a downpour,
I made sure I would be the first
To suggest that we have a race
In the rain, but she turned me down,
And I saw in her smile that we
Were too old for such recklessness.
But that afternoon, the sun blazed,
And she asked what just then had crossed
My mind, that we both go outside.
The road was a patchwork of water.
I wanted to help her across
A rain puddle, forgetting that
Her legs were longer than mine.

***

Love Makes the World Go Round

He was wild
In her sixth month, he had the map of the world
Tattooed on her.
And then, without saying goodbye,
He left for America.

In her trimester,
Her belly grew into a tight and shiny globe
The Northern Hemisphere stretched around
The North Pole of her navel.
She would rub the northern slope of her abdomen
And feel the kick of the fetus
Between the United States and Canada.
And then she would wonder
In which countries
He would be now.

Since then she’d had five men
In as many years—
And five children.
This was to keep her hands holding the globe
Of her belly.
This was her only way of feeling the world—
And of going
To America.