Honored to be the Poet-in-Residence for the Conference on Gender and International Affairs at the Fletcher School, Tufts University!

On paper I am many things
an immigrant, a Filipino,
an Asian,
a Pacific Islander,
a woman of color,
and these forged brands
both brand and ring
with my identity.

I am always singing.
I am a bell for humans like me,
for ones that have found
themselves cowed and shamed,
for the ones who have been overlooked
and blamed,
for the ones that been exploded
in blood and maimed
for merely being.

I sing too for you,
for I am as much in your shoes
as you are mine—
We are of the same ilk,
same breed, same kind.

We press against the forces
that are trapped in some odd rewind,
some backwards mutilation of
morals and rights.

And against this, we must fight.

Here we nod with the baubles of time
on our wrists and
we move with the mood
of our fists raised,
for we cannot acquiesce
to a world that does not acknowledge
our difference as power,
our power as influence.

We are electric bodies before anything
and before that
we are electric,
the stuff of the universe
made to glimmer and grow.

Wrapped in the flow of our lives
we move and expand,
and each moment
we seek, we begin again–

We are caught in a wind,
but we are the ones
that blow the world wide open.