#geolingo
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theshorepoetry.bsky.social
“& this is just another word for elegy
because I am mechanical & hold deserts for tear ducts. I remember December
where I dressed myself with metal music”

From “Boyhood Requiem” by Jaiden Geolingo in ISSUE 25!
Jaiden Geolingo "Boyhood Requiem" — THE SHORE
POETRY
www.theshorepoetry.org
March 28, 2025 at 12:01 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
Helen Gu draws on the body, the landscape, & the four walls domestic in her circumvolution of matrilineal spoor. Daughters: be softer, be smaller; be grateful. Mothers are memory, are forged without kind. Jump Cut is a leap with a tow line, the grasp of a talon on ankle mid fledge..
Jump Cut Helen Gu cover: Three red snappers hang to dry over a place setting of plate, glass, and wire cloche. The tails of the the top third of the image is taken over by orange smoke that obscures one of their tails. The image is in the style of an oil painting. text: Listen. When you have a daughter, you’ll understand how to burn your body to keep her warm. How to burn her body to keep her close. Selkie I peel my body for the skin beneath the skin. Carcass outside ocean. The boy I love tells me I’m beautiful and I swallow him. He presses the blubber against his face, hangs it in the living room out of reach. I club myself for pelt: scrape fat off my body with a cleaver, flayed out. The last time I saw you, I salted my tongue with seawater until my skin osmosed into my hands, spilling away. Flint flake, shark tooth. You stretch it until it does not fit my body. My mouth shrivels and falls away. October rainfall puddling in your palms. Your fingers rammed down my throat, reaching for an antecedent. There are yesterdays but no tomorrows, there is: my cerebrum in your mouth, skin lining your stomach like an overcoat. Frothing at the lips—the drain in the kitchen sink swallows us both. Family Gathering As Mother’s Pregnancy Cravings My grandmother taught me a woman’s presence can be measured in negative space. Which is to say I am substantial as the empty layers in my mother ’s womb before light swaddled my raisined body into deliverance. Every summer in Shanghai, she slices tofu into peppered pillows, drizzles the skin with red sauce, spilling. Your mother craved this a lot when she was pregnant, she tells me. We knew you were going to be a girl. Sichuan peppercorn scattered across the surface like teeth, loosening. My mouth numbs into girlhood. The husk grinds in the mortar until I can taste the spice stipple on my tongue. Between outline and filament, I am spilling body: splayed on the cutting board, barely even meat. Until I am bloodied instead of plain. I am too numb to feel the measuring tape cutting into my flesh, to watch it tighten. I am sixteen and still too afraid to shrink from girl into woman so I stay simmering inside the clutch of time- lessness. My grandmother tells me I will never be as beautiful as I am now. I do not believe the lipstick-stained plate. It’s cloudy here today, but the sun still beats through our skin. My grandmother complains about condensation cracking skin barrier: the age spotting her skin, the severance freckling mine. I touch the sun-streaked, milk- stained cheek; in the kitchen, she and I are shrinking. In Jump Cut, Helen Gu finds herself in proximity with memory. Framing each poem as a snapshot, Gu explores the definition of vulnerability: life before her existence, how the skin “mottles with guilty verdicts, almost small enough to forget”; transformative rage. These are poems, anatomy, drenched in the somatic. Gu asks the reader to explore the corners of motherhood, of mythology, of “a stomach pallid as a rotting lotus.” Jump Cut doesn't want to be read in one sitting—it prompts the reader to examine, to question, come back to it over and over; to infinitely rebirth. Jaiden Geolingo, author of How to Migrate Ghosts
May 29, 2025 at 1:47 PM
torpor-chamber.bsky.social
#poemoftheday is this stunning "Contrapuntal for my Dead Loves" by Jaiden Geolingo in @theshorepoetry.bsky.social

www.theshorepoetry.org/jaiden-geoli...

#poetry
Jaiden Geolingo "Contrapuntal for My Dead Loves" — THE SHORE
www.theshorepoetry.org
June 19, 2025 at 12:36 PM
theshorepoetry.bsky.social
🌊NEW INTERVIEW ALERT🐚 Enjoy our newest interview with The Shore contributor Jaiden Geolingo, conducted by our Interview Editor, Ella Flores!

www.theshorepoetry.org/interview-ge...
May 15, 2025 at 4:03 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
With two feet in the US and his heart left behind him, Jaiden Geolingo holds tight to both future and history. May How to Migrate Ghosts serve as both anchor and bridge.

Coming August 28th
pre-order link in reply
How to Migrate Ghosts Jaiden Geolingo cover: a grainy, distressed photo of a child standing amidst toy bins in front of a window that floods the top half of the image in white. The child is overdrawn in rough lines with the shape of a ghost costume made of a sheet. text: “if I have ever learned anything from America, it’s that this country is an open jaw; once, I gaped my throat” - Filipino-American Open Letter JAIDEN GEOLINGO’S HOW TO MIGRATE GHOSTS ARRIVES AUGUST 28th pre-orders are open at kithbooks.com/shop Tonight, it is a reverse-Pangea: all continents coalescing into a two-story building in Metro-Atlanta. There are streetboys by the crawfish section & they think the animals are martyrs finding ways to be forgiven, & yet isn’t this spasming lightbulb similar to heaven. Mother picks up the Mang Tomas bottle because tomorrow, we’re cooking countries: Lechon belly slivered to strings of meat. Mother, forgive me & our shopping cart full of monotone psalms rung across Pinoy-burned canyons, or the typhoons unmoored from my hymn. From this side of town, we are mythology to the churches & we slow dance to more foreign radio-songs. Don’t say America is burning still, Father— say we surrender to the night market, this holy temple eulogizing what we know. from ‘Elegy in Farmer’s Market’ & I danced & All my ghosts ruptured the night. & Today I clutched a rosary, pried open a wing & Heard more gospels. Yes, & The songs turn omnipotent & Swallows my confessionals, my body & Its faith singed to shrapnel. Once, I bowed so far down & Saw my future & How the light still passed through. & Despite the bombs there is seawater. & I want to drink it to speak to you. & I, the grieving, want to bend & Bare my mouth open, let you enter & Remember my teeth. ‘Ampersand Theory’ HOE TO MIGRATE GHOSTS JAIDEN GEOLINGO What does it mean to survive your history? Here, Geolingo’s speakers practice an original religion created from the self and meant for respite: a religion of feeling and grievance. Through dexterous and expansive verses, they contemplate national identity by embedding it within landscapes and their climes. “Once, I bowed so far down and saw my future,” Geolingo writes. That future is still “repenting with a landlocked mouth.” That future is deviancy. How haunting. How alive. Evan Wang, 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States Jaiden Geolingo maps the distances between homeland and diaspora, elegy and reinvention, selfhood and myth in this luminous debut. These poems are thick, humid with memory— each vignette is swaddled in adobo steam, Manila floodwater, and prayers to vanished ancestors. Through this rupturing voice, Geolingo crafts a poetics of migration: the ghosts in these pages are remembered and remade, and to read them is to step into the liminal, to speak to the dead, and to listen for their reply. Wenshu Wang, National YoungArts Winner With Distinction in Poetry
July 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
denisebijoux.bsky.social
Great to see some of the #geolingo rocks @catalysenetwork.bsky.social gave away last year at #Matariki on display at @everydaybagels today. #neighbourlife #kikorangi
July 12, 2025 at 2:26 AM
dishsoapquart.bsky.social
Gorgeous snapshot that's a little more relevant than we'd like. Savor "dystopia where we're out past midnight" by Jaiden Geolingo.

Read it on our site: dishsoap-quarterly.com/4-8-25/dysto...
April 9, 2025 at 1:16 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
“if I have ever learned
anything from America,
it’s that this country
is an open jaw; once,
I gaped my throat”
- Jaiden Geolingo, Filipino-American Open Letter

kithbooks.com/shop/p/ghosts
kith in print
Jaiden Geolingo's How to Migrate Ghosts holds the unsteady thread of becoming, belonging, at both fraying ends. Two feet in the US and his heart left behind him, Geolingo serves as both anchor and bri...
kithbooks.com
July 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
HAPPY RELEASE DAY!!!

"Son, write something about burning, the italics watered down
to liquid coal. Son, worship this kerosene.
Ask me anything. Anything at all."

How to Migrate Ghosts
Jaiden Geolingo

now available in Print & eBook
link in reply
How to Migrate Ghosts Jaiden Geolingo cover: a white crayon like drawing of a ghost obscures a child, with white T-shirt sleeves just poking out the sides, standing in front of a curtained window in front of bins of toys. text: "These poems bruise and sing in the same breath" Rishi Janakiraman "These poems are thick, humid with memory - each vignette is swaddled in adobo steam." Wenshu Wang Ars Poetica Son, say the only thing we learned is worship. Putting our palms together & praying for a carcass to turn up so you could write an elegy, or chucking Molotov cocktails at inkwells & talking about fire. Did you know the cool kids want to be diagnosed with a prayer nowadays, preaching to a god made of thermal energy. Oh, let me tell you, son: the best pieces are birthed out of scabs or gunmetal & sometimes rainwater. No gold. Sometimes the moon. In your hands: a new allegory for smoke. Let’s go pray again, son. Fill my quills with blood instead of ink— the softest kind. Congeal & clot all droplets. O, son, we’ve written too much about tsunamis so I want you to say forgive the things synonymous to cobwebs: you, your poems doused in ethanol. I’m holding the matchstick & you need to tell me to light them up. Son, write something about burning, the italics watered down to liquid coal. Son, worship this kerosene. Ask me anything. Anything at all. Say it. Say it good.
August 28, 2025 at 2:34 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
it's Jump Cut Release Day!!!
this one goes out to the daughters of mothers who were daughtered by mothers. it's daughters and mothers all the way down.
Jump Cut Helen Gu cover: Three red snappers hang to dry over a place setting of plate, glass, and wire cloche. The tails of the the top third of the image is taken over by orange smoke that obscures one of their tails. The image is in the style of an oil painting. the cover is overlapped with text reading Release Day!!! “My Grandmother taught me a woman’s presence can be measured in negative space” Family Gathering as Mother’s Pregnancy Cravings In Jump Cut, Helen Gu finds herself in proximity with memory. Framing each poem as a snapshot, Gu explores the definition of vulnerability: life before her existence, how the skin “mottles with guilty verdicts, almost small enough to forget”; transformative rage. These are poems, anatomy, drenched in the somatic. Gu asks the reader to explore the corners of motherhood, of mythology, of  “a stomach pallid as a rotting lotus.”  Jump Cut doesn't want to be read in one sitting—it prompts the reader to examine, to question, come back to it over and over; to infinitely rebirth. Jaiden Geolingo, author of How to Migrate Ghosts “The boy I love tells me I’m beautiful and I swallow him. He presses the blubber against his face, hangs it in the living room out of reach. I club myself for pelt: scrape the fat off my body with a cleaver, flayed out.” Selkie Gu writes a world for anyone who has ever wanted to split a mirror and scream soundlessly, for those who crave beauty and cutting emotion in the gracious abundance she offers. No line of Jump Cut will disappoint–instead, each will open up the parts of your heart you did not know existed. Ivi Hua, author of Body, Dissected
June 25, 2025 at 2:04 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
if you liked...
you might like...

Body, Dissected by Ivi Hua
Jump Cut by Helen Gu
How to Migrate Ghosts by Jaiden Geolingo

kithbooks.com
under the title "if you liked... you might like..." are the cover images of the following books: Body, Dissected by Ivi Hua - a cyanotype of flowers and leaves in shades of purple, green, and blue Jump Cut by Helen Gu - three red snappers hang from an orange fog of steam above a place setting How to Migrate Ghosts by Jaiden Geolingo - a child standing in front of toy bins is drawn over with a sheet ghost costume
November 7, 2025 at 2:13 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
“this country
is an open jaw; once, I gaped my throat so open"
- Jaiden Geolingo, Filipino-American Open Letter
@geodennn

Print: kithbooks.com/shop/p/ghosts
eBook: kithbooks.com/digital/p/ghosts
kith in print
Jaiden Geolingo's How to Migrate Ghosts holds the unsteady thread of becoming, belonging, at both fraying ends. Two feet in the US and his heart left behind him, Geolingo serves as both anchor and bri...
kithbooks.com
August 28, 2025 at 2:34 PM
kithbooks.bsky.social
Ars Poetica
Jaiden Geolingo

31 of wim's favourite poems from kith books
#SealeyChallenge
18/31
from How to Migrate Ghosts by Jaiden Geolingo Ars Poetica Son, say the only thing we learned is worship. Putting our palms together & praying for a carcass to turn up so you could write an elegy, or chucking Molotov cocktails at inkwells & talking about fire. Did you know the cool kids want to be diagnosed with a prayer nowadays, preaching to a god made of thermal energy. Oh, let me tell you, son: the best pieces are birthed out of scabs or gunmetal & sometimes rainwater. No gold. Sometimes the moon. In your hands: a new allegory for smoke. Let’s go pray again, son. Fill my quills with blood instead of ink— the softest kind. Congeal & clot all droplets. O, son, we’ve written too much about tsunamis so I want you to say forgive the things synonymous to cobwebs: you, your poems doused in ethanol. I’m holding the matchstick & you need to tell me to light them up. Son, write something about burning, the italics watered down to liquid coal. Son, worship this kerosene. Ask me anything. Anything at all. Say it. Say it good.
August 18, 2025 at 3:17 PM
theshorepoetry.bsky.social
Jaiden Geolingo "Boyhood Requiem" — THE SHORE www.theshorepoetry.org/jaiden-geoli...
May 11, 2025 at 12:02 PM