This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Claudia Santos, is from Maybe the Body by Asa Drake (Tin House 2026).
2
I want to go home, which is a concession—home isn’t here. The opposite of
possibility, to give up possession. I often think I am losing ground.
When the passport office closes, I cut my hair.
The passport office opens. I grow it out again.
It is possible what belongs to me doesn’t dictate where I belong.
Once, at the beginning of an important friendship, we pointed at our flag and
joked, Can either of us write anything sincere about that?1
____________
1 (Attempt)
A flag can be colorized as a second flag to represent the smallest
faction of people or to celebrate a holiday or to make a statement
—and the flag is still recognizable but now means the United States
during Breast Cancer Awareness Month or the United States
of Police Officers or the United Colonized State as Mark Twain
once described, proposing a flag for my mother’s country,
We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted
black & the stars replaced by the skull & crossbones.
Of course, my country is my mother’s country. She insists, love both!
Asa Drake (she/her) is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
- Sundress Reads: Review of My Arabic Breakfast - April 6, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maybe the Body by Asa Drake - April 6, 2026
- Creative Writing Workshop at Ijams Nature Center - April 5, 2026