KARAN

Narisma, thank you for these powerful and intricate poems that navigate colonialism, queerness, and inherited trauma with such masterful precision. In “Freedom from Loss,” you write, “We are a flowering race, even if we are conceived / From the ashes of our deceased” – a line that captures both grief and resilience so beautifully. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you start writing a poem? Does it begin with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

NARISMA

You are too kind, Karan! The phrase “we are a flowering race” is borrowed from Filipino American novelist Carlos Bulosan, whose essay “Freedom from Want” accompanies Norman Rockwell’s painting of the same name. The writing processes for “Freedom from Loss” and “Marginalia” were a unique blend of quoting, alluding to, and modifying pre-existing texts. Generally speaking, however, I lack a proper routine. Although I approach poems rather haphazardly, I am guided first and foremost by imagery, especially in a bodily sense. Hunger, pain, touch. And of course, that which alters the body: pills, booze, death. These tropes are so ingrained in queer poetry, I sometimes fear I lack a true “voice.” In the words of Nigerian writer Chibụìhè Obi-Achimbá, “The queer body is always, always under persistent attack [...] Writing poems helps me to be in constant conversation with my body, it helps me access the deep recess of my psyche.” It seems contrived, but I am driven to write out of necessity. Yes, poetry brings me joy, and is a craft I’d love to devote more time to professionally, but I discovered long ago that literature is not only a form of escapism, but survival. Even now, as an adult, writing helps me process my childhood steeped in substance abuse, intergenerational trauma, and parental neglect.

KARAN

In “Marginalia,” you braid academic theory, personal history, and familial memory to explore colonialism and identity. “My third space is liminal. Stairwell into nothing, lotto booth with no vendor.” How do you think about the relationship between theory and lived experience in your work? What possibilities does this hybrid form open up?

NARISMA

To some degree, I think it is a privilege to contemplate academic theories when so many people are struggling to get by. When writing about colonialism and identity, I am conscious of those who lack the financial or literary resources that I do. Consider the following lines from “Freedom from Loss,” modified from Bulosan’s original text: “Out of desperation, I burn my poetry books to keep us warm. It does not matter. You cannot be creative if you have nothing to eat, no time or ability to read and discuss things.”

“Marginalia” holds a special place in my heart. It’s part of my “micro-essay” series, which includes “Boyhood,” “Batok,” and “Derivation.” This piece excerpts, among others, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, both of whom I discovered as a college freshman. The latter’s writings on errantry and exile continue to shape my ideas of personhood and empire. Several years ago, while freewriting on the train from Trenton to New York, I was struck by the similarities between alcoholism and colonialism — their destructive properties, how they invade the body, the myriad of ways each is passed down. The harmful effects of colonialism reverberate across generations. Likewise, children inherit their parents’ alcoholism, despite not picking up the drink. The concept of addiction as a family disease was introduced to me through my Adult Children of Alcoholics support group. “Marginalia” references this so-called “Laundry List,” blending fact and fiction while interrogating the “third space” created by imperialism, loss, and substance abuse. 

As a cross-genre work, “Marginalia” echoes the notion of hybridity that remains central to post-colonial discourse. The piece situates familial memory within academia, morphing into a meditation on my mother’s alcoholism and eventual death. This is something I imagine you resonate with, Karan (your poem “How To Quit” is so incredibly moving).

KARAN

Your work often engages with multiple languages and cultural contexts. In “Uncle Sugar,” phrases in Tagalog punctuate moments of intense emotion. Tell us about your relationship with language(s) in your poetry. How does moving between languages shape the way you think about meaning and memory?

NARISMA

The Tagalog lines from “Uncle Sugar” are literal quotations by the former chief of the Philippine National Police, who urged former drug users to commit arson. “I’m Not Myself Right Now” better answers your question regarding how language shapes the way I think of meaning and memory. Although I’m now based in New York, I’ve lived in Shanghai, Macau, and Metro Manila, and possess both Filipino and German ancestry. I’m interested in estranged mother tongues, and how phrases with a literal meaning in one language might gain poetic connotations in another: “The word for brief in Tagalog is saglit. It shares a suffix with the word ulit, meaning repeat. / My people are a recurring brevity.” Instead of writing strictly in English or Tagalog, my poems often combine the two, creating something that isn’t poetic in a traditional sense to either language. Some readers may find it clunky, disjointed, or even tacky, but I myself exist in this third space and revel in its weirdness.

KARAN

The figure of the mother appears throughout these poems as both presence and absence. I’m thinking of “I’m Not Myself Right Now” where you write “motherlessness... follows you everywhere. It exists in what do your parents do? and I ♡ MOM mugs.” In a sense all poetry is about loss — loss of innocence, loved ones, joy, childhood. Would you like to speak about the writing of grief and how poetry helps you navigate loss?

NARISMA

I appreciate your comment that the mother figure, even in absence, punctuates these poems. My work is often semi-fictitious, but my mother did really die when I was 16, and I have written about this loss obsessively. Truthfully, however, I mourned my mother even while she lived, for her alcoholism robbed us of a “normal” relationship. While I don’t agree that all poetry is about loss, the writing of grief has absolutely helped me navigate my mother’s death. It was especially important to jot these feelings down as a teenager, when most of my peers still had two living parents, and couldn’t relate to my experience.

I later minored in thanatology at Brooklyn College and came to loathe the Kübler-Ross model, which remains rampant in popular media: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Grief is not as linear as we might think. On this topic, I recommend “The Love Of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed, in which she ponders the death of her own mother. It might be the most impactful essay on parental loss I’ve ever read. Through my poems, I explore the messy, perplexing, and contradictory ways I’ve processed my mother’s passing. In “Freedom from Loss,” I admit to attempting suicide: “In an alternate reality, my suicide attempt is successful [...] I wanted to feel needed, so I died.” In “I’m Not Myself Right Now,” I mention reckless partying and sex: “We ambush the liquor store during Passover. Get handsy with strangers in Bushwick.” And in “Marginalia,” I reference self-harm: “At some point, I was there. I was // everything. // My mother’s vomit, the // razor blade // against // my skin.”

I’d like to believe I’m doing better now, but it took a lot of therapy and sleepless nights. As Strayed writes, “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.”

KARAN

As I’ve already pointed it out a couple of times, your poems often wrestle with queerness and colonialism simultaneously, and as someone from a colonized country myself, I can totally see why. In “Freedom from Loss,” Miguel becomes both lover and metaphor, “transformed into a bottle / Of glass.” How do you see the relationship between queer desire and colonial history in your work? I’m sometimes so angry how they’ve fucked us over. 

NARISMA

Ironically, when I first drafted “Freedom from Loss,” I had not yet come to terms with my bisexuality. The poem was nascent in that sense, although I’d been engrossed with outlawed bodies and forbidden desires long before my introduction to queer theory. The first portion of the epigraph (“We are the sufferers who suffer for natural love of man for another man”), describes the Filipino American condition, but is retroactively queered through this lens. Likewise, the character Miguel is both a metaphorical lover and literal reference to San Miguel Pale Pilsen, a popular Philippine lager.

I am not the first poet to associate violence with queer desire and colonial history. In fact, the relationship between all three is so widely accepted, perhaps even implicitly expected of writers of color, that my work borders on artificial. I am thinking of Annelie Hyatt’s review of Time Is a Mother (2022) by Ocean Vuong, in which she writes, “That Asian American artists must offer an emotional service to the public is unique to [...] their historical role in the economy, which has largely revolved around service jobs.” Filipino migrants specifically have a long history of manual labor and nursing, which I explore in “Freedom from Loss.” Hyatt contends that Asian Americans face pressure to create mentally destructive art because “the stereotype of Asian hospitality has fueled the implicit belief that Asian American art should require the artist to sacrifice a part of [themself] for the emotional catharsis of the consumer.”

Nevertheless, I continue writing about “how they’ve fucked us over,” as you say, because there is power in disclosing one’s own narrative, and these violent acts are far from fictional (“Freedom from Loss” references the Yakima Valley riots of 1927, when mobs of white men assaulted and displaced local Filipinos). That being said, I’ve become increasingly aware of my contribution to trauma porn, and hope to establish avenues of queer joy through poetry.

KARAN

This is a staple question for us and I’m always surprised by the range in everyone’s responses: There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

NARISMA

Out of curiosity, I browsed through other interviewees’ answers to this question, and was astounded by the variety of responses! I’d love to learn more about this school of poetry, and how these categories are constructed, because on one hand, I suppose the body, mind, heart, and soul are inextricable. On the other hand, I agree with fellow Filipino poet Asa Drake: “I only believe in the body. Maybe because I can’t imagine a self not shaped by the body I’ve inherited.” This is especially true of queer bodies, whose deepest fears and desires are politicized and manifested through the flesh. Debates over work equality, gender-affirming care, and same-sex marriage are ideological in nature, but enacted against the physical form. So it is with poetry. Whatever thoughts or emotions I encounter while writing are contained within the body, no matter how fleeting or fallible it may be. It’s also worth noting I used to be fat, something I explore in “I’m Not Myself Right Now.” I will always view myself as such, long after losing some weight. Do I see my poetry moving in a different direction? Perhaps. Hopefully by then, I’ll care a little less about calories or the size of my waist.

KARAN

Your work engages deeply with Filipino history and politics, particularly in pieces like “Poem in Which Our Men Still Belong to Us.” How do you think about poetry’s role in documenting and resisting historical violence? What responsibilities do you feel as a poet writing about these histories? Is all poetry political? Is there a way to remove yourself from it in any way, or is that the realm of the ultra-privileged? 

NARISMA

Like many things, I suspect that not all poetry is political, but rather, all poetry can be politicized, by virtue of the social context in which a poet or their work exists. Whether or not ultra-privileged writers can remove themselves from this constraint also has to do with others’ perception of you. Poets from marginalized communities may find it impossible to write apolitically for outside audiences, because they remain Othered regardless of the content of their work. My own writing is inherently political because I am passionate about documenting Philippine culture for a readership and market that generally sidelines Filipinos. “Poem in Which Our Men Still Belong to Us” addresses the Philippine drug war by invoking religious imagery associated with the killing of Michael Siaron, which garnered global controversy in 2016. From the archipelago’s diverse native history to America’s genocidal conquest of the early 20th century to the country’s lingering status as a neocolonial state, the Philippines is largely scrubbed off the textbooks. In a time of increasing censorship, erasure, and authoritarianism, poetry remains vital to preserving these unheralded stories.

KARAN

Religion and spirituality appear in complex ways throughout your poems. In “Uncle Sugar,” (love the title!) prayer and violence intertwine: “I beg God to smite me / if no one lets me live here anyway.” Tell us about your relationship with faith and how it manifests in your poetry.

NARISMA

That line from “Uncle Sugar” is partially inspired by a college classmate of mine, who confessed to me that he once lay in bed and begged God to smite him in order to shake any doubts of His existence. Faith, desperation, and the religious connotations of gendered and racialized violence appear repeatedly in my work. I come from a fervently religious household and attended a missionary school from third to twelfth grade. Although I am still a person of faith, I have a complicated relationship with the Church and have largely renounced its harmful ideologies related to gender and sexuality, just to name a few.

As noted in these poems, the Philippines and the United States are similar in that Christianity arrived with colonizers and remains deeply embedded in local culture and politics. Christofascism is an even more important topic now with the current Trump administration, and requires all of us to question the perversion of religion and its use as an oppressive tool. In “Freedom from Loss,” Christianity is treated sardonically: “In America, God is the government. Here, I am also free / To be killed, but at least [...] I’ve been spared / From tyranny.” And in “Poem in Which Our Men Still Belong to Us,” faith is both redemptive and isolating: “Love brought Lazarus back to life. This is how I met my beloved, in the morgue, martyred by four gunshots to the chest.”

One of my favorite musicians, Ethel Cain, captures many of these ambivalent feelings in her interview for HERO: “Whether I like it or not, God always has and always will be a huge part of my life [...] I don’t feel like there’s ever been a space for queer people to discuss the impact that it had on them, for better or worse.” It’s not so easy for queer people to abandon their faith, especially if they’re coming from places where religion exists everywhere. In my case, this meant crucifixes on my neck, or the door, or the wall; Bible verses on billboards and the side of buses; attending sermons once, maybe twice, a week; learning the gospels back to front and back again. As Cain says, “It’s not really something you can walk away from. And I’d rather just sit with it than be like, ‘Fuck the church!’ [...] They say that artists should create from the heart, this is what’s in there.”

KARAN

You describe yourself as a multimodal creator who moves between Manila, New York, and everywhere in between. How does this movement between places influence your work? What role does physical and cultural displacement play in your poetry?

NARISMA

As a child, my family frequently switched locations due to my father’s work. While this was sometimes frustrating (I recall crying myself to sleep after relocating to Manila in third grade), I think it granted me a sense of curiosity for cultures vastly different from my own. Attending two international schools also meant I was constantly surrounded by those with varying worldviews. I have a particular soft spot for the Desi community, which has welcomed me with open arms everywhere I go (“Moonrise at Avenue H” is a tribute to my beloved friends, Mustafa and Idrees). This physical and cultural displacement is reflected in my habit of lifting text from other writers’ work, especially if these sources would never be paired otherwise. However, as mentioned in “Marginalia,” I sometimes fear I’m running away from something, rather than living in the present (“Exile is still movement / even if it’s self-imposed [...] Oh, anak, / where /  have you been? // … Running away, I guess”). In “Uncle Sugar,” I make a similar statement: “my bed is no longer safe / in my dreams / the dead return / while asleep / I’m still running.” My work often carries this frenetic energy, whether I’m fleeing from a person, place, or feeling. I no longer believe the old adage, “it’s about the journey, not the destination.” Both are equally important to me. My poems are shaped by my physical location, the place(s) I call home, and the loved ones who inhabit it.

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice have you received so far?

NARISMA

While completing my undergraduate thesis on West African art, my advisor told me that he refrains from using parentheses altogether, for if the information enclosed were not included in the body text, it’s often not important to mention at all. This approach is a bit drastic, but it did fundamentally alter how I view my work. Although I rarely use the actual symbol in my poems, my first drafts often include a lot of details that are parenthetical in the sense that it’s simply fluff I can later edit out. Indeed, I revised my pieces with ONLY POEMS more times than I can count. “Freedom from Loss” and “Marginalia” were especially tricky, as I am fussy about how sentences and line breaks look across the page. I’m also not particularly satisfied with the layout of “Poem in Which Our Men Still Belong to Us,” but the beauty of poems and essays is that they are not set in stone. You can always return to your work and change it. Fatalism and creativity do not share the same bed.

KARAN

We always ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help them kickstart a poem?

NARISMA

Let’s push the limits of the “after” poem. Select one work by another poet who inspires you, one news article that recently caught your eye, and one of your favorite songs. Extract the most impactful line(s) from each and embed them into your own piece, building your poem around these borrowed quotes. Make sure to acknowledge your sources by adding a note at the end.

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

NARISMA

What a lovely question. I’m a huge fan of the coming-of-age genre, which brings me comfort long after high school. I particularly like the films Lady Bird (2017) by Greta Gerwig and Only Yesterday (1991) by Isao Takahata, as well as the album Pure Heroine (2013) by Lorde, the title of which I have tattooed on my left arm. Despite what mainstream media tells us, we “come of age” multiple times throughout our lives. I am inspired by the fact I will encounter periods of transition and personal growth well beyond my teenage years. 

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most so far.

NARISMA

Cliché as it may sound, given their immense popularity among gay readers, Richard Siken and Ocean Vuong are the first writers who come to mind. Their respective collections Crush (2004) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) remain so deeply influential to my craft and conceptualization of my own queerness. Other poets who inspire me are Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang, Warsan Shire, and my wonderful friend, Yvanna Vien Tica, among others.