Krysta Lee Frost is a mixed race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Journal, Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, The Margins, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Pasay City.
The gaze tells me if nothing else I am worth a gawk. Glittering the bodice with sequins, what possibilities do I erect as the city sharpens the night sky into a dreaded opacity. I reset my angles, my allowances / adapted. I borrow a body to make myself real, palming the palm bloody proof. It fits real nice: my becoming against an unfastening neglect rejecting any advance unrehearsed. I am a modest technology. I do what I’m told to get attention / and keep it. I shimmy out of the dress and shade away my boundaries when touch comes and the eye swallows my image. Can I continue— / does this feel good—incentive to accept the incendiary glance. To upend intention into identity / woven into its many forms: a dress on the floor, a moon forlorn in its retelling. What energy is required to ordain presentation in its present tense disowning itself as it confuses one thing for another, the bodice for the body, the glitter for the sheen of skin, the eye for its hunger to discern / disfigurement, recovering from the haze of a breath on the surface of an excuse to be seen. Beauty remains contained in the room, confined to touch -ing its projection, its makeshift stand-in for an unnamed, unmanned need— / Dawn resists my machinations.