The writing and art are interwoven with themes that range from childhood, family and home, to investigations of the body and the mind. These works resonate with truth, no matter how inexact, magnified and misshapen by memory, fear, love.

Writings by Arlene Ang, Barbara Jane Bermeo, Joseph O. Legaspi, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Joel Toledo reveal the ambiguous heart of family and home. Arlene Ang’s poems conjure a special kind of happiness, shadowed by aw, even as Jill Chan’s

Brave Woman
by Grace R. Monte de Ramos

I am a mother of sons.
Two joined the army when they were young;
There was not enough money for school,
They had no skills for jobs in foundries
And factories, and it was easy to sign up
And learn how to handle a gun.

I am a mother of sons, two sons
And one, the youngest, now gone.
In his youth he was taken
By men whose names I never will learn.
I only know they were soldiers, like my sons,
Cradling fearsome guns.
He was a fine young

Missing Home
by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

Do children absorb what we learn while they are still in the womb?  I was taking language lessons during my first pregnancy, and I wonder if this explains Joel’s aptitude for languages.

It amazes me how easily he switches from Dutch to English and how he’s managed to pick up some Filipino words which his father still can’t master.

It’s fun listening to him say: “What did I tell you, O di ba? See, see, O.”

He says it exactly as

by Linh Dinh

Read Linh Dinh’s poetry
http://www.apwn.net/index.php?/writing/more/three_poems_from_linh_dinh/

by Linh Dinh

Read Linh Dinh’s poetry
http://www.apwn.net/index.php?/writing/more/three_poems_from_linh_dinh/