RAPHAEL CORONEL is a poet from the Philippines. He is currently a martial arts coach for UFC Gym and a research associate in the De La Salle University Publishing house. He is also taking his MFA in Creative writing in the same university.
This is Pantomime
Forget what you want isn’t there. She brought a pillow to sleep wherever. Upstairs, where a dog’s bark escapes the room. Soon, I’ll save enough to travel. Call out her name, and you won’t recognize your voice. Convince me it’s you my hands feel. A figure uses a knife. Light finds its way between my ribs. Feel for a puncture wound, you find stitches holding your flesh together. Be careful to fill your lungs. I’m ringing your phone. There is no dog, and there are no bones to gnaw. Show me how to cut your hair. Heat knows where it has to be, so arms stretch toward the familiar. She takes her time deciding which flavor to get. You can’t hear her breathing while she sleeps. The phone vibrates in someone’s back pocket. Her head sinks into the pillow. There are black ants drowning in the ice cream cup. We’ll keep lying to each other. Limbs know where they have to be. A ringing escapes the room. Soon, a hand will reach out and touch what isn’t there, and they’ll believe you’re holding a knife. This will last, now tell me a lie.
Lullaby
I don’t want a child to sleep
on xanor from my hands
shaking, we’ll both shake
a box of colored cereal and milk
before morning pills, maybe
I’ll gamble the child will have none
of me, my skull, white walls,
the mother can sing instead
Garden
Between France and Switzerland,
particles collided at light speed,
seeds broke apart, sprouted green,
cheeks, ripe fruit,
her hair swirled
down a drain, he poured coffee into
a cup, blackness stirred the sun into waves,
waves decayed, shortly after particles break,
there isn’t enough time, for science
to tear things apart,
she pretended to sink
her teeth in, a peach, a painting
of islands sits on her shelf,
shifting
on the mantle of the Earth, she held
her mug to warm her hands, covered
in soil, he doesn’t remember how bruises appeared
on his shoulder, star-shaped,
microscopic
black holes are a possibility, here, gravity
pulls differently,
sleep paralysis, in the dream,
islands were painted thick with green, eyelids
kept closed, he couldn’t find her, language
is time present, she took her time
picking her outfit, she woke him up,
softly, coffee, soil in his eyes, shifting
between dreams, he left the garden lights on.
Familiar
It’s easy to forget
a face, you lose something
after being too familiar, we
forgot the ghost in that scene,
its crooked teeth on the tv
matched mine.
We had smaller hands
catching each other
insects in the garden. Each
had names for the day
they lived, I don’t remember
how you looked, so I’ve taken
pictures of everything small
and neat insects pinned
on styrofoam, I’ll remember, I
remembered I covered my
eyes until the ghost left,
you asked for wine, a knife
greasy from the birthday cake,
crawling with ants, why
do you look different, light
a candle to keep them away,
give me a name to the face,
I’m seeing someone else
and she’s wearing your dress
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 