This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Claudia Santos, is from Maybe the Body by Asa Drake (Tin House 2026).
To Someone Who’s Heard, I Love You, Too Many Times
Your friend explains having been in a room
filled with other people who, like you and your friend,
collect words from parents. The words
[ ]
don’t come together into a language.
And the person on the stage expressed deep shame
for a project where she had tried to speak
but misspoke in a language
for which she had no teacher.
This is what you most fear. In one language,
you are the perpetual infant. You point to the moon
and call it payneta moon, once every 28 days.
Nanay gave you what is specific. Not the general
name for the moon [ ].
Everything you say
timing and intimacy has shaped.
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.
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