Sacred & Perishable
Carissa Natalia Baconguis
Nine Syllables Press, 51pp., $12.95
How do you elegize a body in transition? Carissa Natalia Baconguis reckons with this question in her debut chapbook from Nine Syllables Press, in which the speaker of one poem declares, “Everyone wants / to step forward / into new light, live / comfortably knowing / the sacrifice was worth it—” The collection serves at once as extended elegy, record keeping of anti-trans violence, and a testament to the enduring power of queer friendship.
In Sacred & Perishable, Baconguis follows the lives of friends Dian and Carlos from their shared childhood in the Philippines’ Cotabato province in the early aughts through their reunion about a decade later while Dian is a medical student in Manila. There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole. This is an intimacy built not only of proximity—the opportunity to look closely at these poems’ subjects—but of chosen family, extended out from the page towards the reader.
In the opening poem of the collection, “Dian and the Revelation of Carlos, 2005,” Baconguis ushers readers into a quiet moment between children when Carlos reveals himself to Dian as a shapeshifter, capable of falling asleep as a boy and waking up as a girl:
Such is their weight upon the grass, body as imprint, as ecosystem.
It is 5:00 PM and all days
enter transformation
As in the opening poem, titles throughout serve to orient readers across the physical and temporal geographies, such as “Carlos as Orpheus, 2007,” “Dian as Orpheus, 2019,” and “Dian Reconstructs Carlos, 2017.” The speaker of these poems operates as silent witness, making space for the reader to sit alongside them in witnessing the unfurling of Dian and Carlos’s lives; death and violence moving together with love and recognition, their collective presence felt in Carlos’s nightly transitions, and childhood revelations of socialized difference. As the omniscient speaker of “Dian in The Girl’s Restroom, 2006” says:
Before they knew what it meant to be a girl or a boy
what they knew was the difference
of ritual. The girl thing
of walking together
to the restrooms.
Baconguis employs a rich tapestry of Filipino mythologies to braid this collection together, acting at once as foundation for, and mirror to the lives of Dian and Carlos. Baconguis’s engagement of the mythological invites readers into a lineage that predates colonial rule and upends western mythos of transness as a new phenomena. In “Dian Receives the Scholarship, 2007,” she writes:
When the God Apolaki stabs Goddess Mayari’s eye and only in the violence
does he remember she is his sister and that he loves her. When
the Goddess Alunsina realizes that her creations mean she must destroy
her lover’s work, she leaves him. No matter how you see it,
even the earth is a love story
This is a collection that makes no bones about its demand for a reader’s attention. Attention to the vision of a post-colonial future, to tender intimacies of queer friendship and love, and the omnipresent violences of imperialist and misogynistic ideology which undermine them. In its movement across time, Sacred & Perishable invokes philosopher Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer time, that the lives of queer folx are formed from a collection of temporality-bending events—coming out, closeting, re-closeting transition, and re-imagined life schedules.1 “Look,” commands the body of this collection. Look at all that was and remains here. Look at all that was wrought and rent from this and do not look away. As the speaker of “Dian Reconstructs Carlos, 2017” says:
most days carlos is a boy
but dian always stays dian.
that’s the murder
clue: his girl body
was a secret base
no one else was supposed to see
Arriving in a moment of increasing transphobia and fascism on a global scale, Sacred & Perishable is a haunting and necessary debut, and ushers Carissa Natalia Baconguis into the public sphere as an important new voice in contemporary poetry.
- Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. ↩︎
About the Author
Carissa Natalia Baconguis is a writer from Laguna, Philippines. Graduating from Ateneo de Manila University and St. Cloud State University, she has received a poetry award from the 2019 Loyola Schools Award for the Arts and became a fellow for the The 20th IYAS La Salle National Writers’ Workshop in 2020. Her poems can be found in Pa-Liwanag: Writings by Filipinas in Translation (Gantala Press/Tilted Axis Press, 2020), 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine Hong Kong, Young Star Philippines, TLDTD Journal, and LIGÁW Anthology.
Contributor Bio
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, non-binary writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere. They are a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.
Contents
Chapbook Poem: When I Was Straight by Dustin Brookshire
“‘When I Was Straight’ prompted me to think about a common queer experience—how most parents assume their children are ‘straight’ and expect their children to live a ‘straight’ life.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: American Girl: Fort Hood, 2023 by Thea Matthews
“[W]eaving in and juxtaposing the lyrics of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl.’ The song’s themes of desperation, wanderlust, and longing are subverted by Ana’s life and tragedy at Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, Texas.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
“It seems such a shame that a beautiful location is just gathering dust and overgrowth, and I wanted to lean into the juxtaposition of that.” Read three poems by Bryana Fern along with a few words about “Women on the Wall.”
Bodies in Transition: Sacred & Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
“There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole.” Read Gray Davidson Carroll’s full review.
“In ‘No Breaks’ I was writing about something I hope I never have to experience. … I tried to keep despair at bay and show some defiance and resilience.” Read two poems by Gerald Yelle along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
November ’25: New Staff, Issue Archive & Donations
Read a note from Editor Aiden Hunt about our new Poetry Readers, the additions of an Issue Archive and a Contributor Fund, Fall poetry submissions, and Gaza.
Chapbook Poem: Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh by Rebekah Wolman
“Settling on the mirror form opened the way into the parallels between the original image of the egrets, their reflection, and their ambiguous relationship and the shifting, even reversing, roles of an adult daughter and her aging mother…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2025 along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
“Subsequent drafts enabled me to … uncover the metaphor of exile, whose meanings are intended to move readers from an experience of alienation to one of discernment of the liberating qualities of outsiderhood.” Read three poems by Alexandra Burack, along with a few words about “To Know Blue From the Color of Snow at Dusk.”