My Love Is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Ugly Duckling Presse
Published 1st November 2025.
At a house party with as many antipsychotics as party drugs, Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—is tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship. Dancing and stumbling with his Filipina nurse friends, Danilo traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog. Outside the window, the lake is too big and crashing. In a hybrid of drama and poetry, Rob Macaisa Colgate writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care: “That’s so like me, to treat my body / like a gun: either he doesn’t want / to touch it or uses it to make me / stay. I knew he would run.”
At a house party with as many antipsychotics as party drugs, Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—is tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship. Dancing and stumbling with his Filipina nurse friends, Danilo traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog. Outside the window, the lake is too big and crashing. In a hybrid of drama and poetry, Rob Macaisa Colgate writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care: “That’s so like me, to treat my body / like a gun: either he doesn’t want / to touch it or uses it to make me / stay. I knew he would run.”
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