My Love is Water

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.”