Culture and Arts Notebook

POEM         If you don’t want to love I’ll take care of it I will love.   If you don’t want to smile I’ll take care of it I will smile.   If you don’t want to…

TALK/PRESENTATION   My talk can be summed up in three things: First, the context and my experience during this pandemic time. Second, the Well of Ginhawa, and its related metaphors. And third, how I started and built this poetry community.…

INTERVIEW         Once I read the short story “Life Sentence” in Lightspeed Magazine, I decided to save it to my collections of short stories I should revisit. It was 2019, and Matthew Baker was on my radar.…

ESSAY We must safeguard the web of life and care about the other living species that we share this planet with. Pygmy tarsiers eat and host bugs that we’ve seen at home — insects, spiders, lizards, bedbugs, lice, fleas, roundworms,…

POETRY             <A Prelude> In the early days of the Co-vid 19 pandemic, everyone was trying to come to grips with the isolation that the lockdown imposed on almost everyone. Anxiety over the unknown was…

POEMS by Erlie Lopez   #1.Yellow Bursts Yellow is the color of sorrow: the ribbons tied around trees, the shirts and pins from seasons of arduous street protests. Yellow is the color of love: lovely flowers around the urn, the…

POEM           I put myself in your skin, and I was you. I felt your awe, your fear, your pain, your pleasure, and the divine spark that became the Force within you, impelling you forward since…

POEM         The raindrops were shining like stars On the grass.   Fallen from the sky They lay quiet, evanescent.   There they were Stars we don’t see during the day.   Unseen but ever-present As I…

LITERARY         The family group stood in the jungle clearing. The rosy dawn was just beginning to filter through the trees. The grandfather and grandmother, their numerous grown children, the wives and husbands and grandchildren old enough…

ART EXHIBIT         As an honorary reporter for Korean Culture and Information Service this year, a group of reporters based in Korea had the privilege of visiting the special exhibition entitled “Icons and Identities” presents by the…