Notes on the West Coast

I want to prove the rumor of cold glass, cold air.
I’ve built a compass to point  westward for every circumstance.
I heard about the absence of tumbleweeds.                  
There are no murmurs in your pasture &
even less camouflage.
In my humid hotel, the windows outlast your hillsides.
Many metaphors can be made: the buildings of man-made chimeras
thrash around while everyone watches the wreck.
Your casinos threaten an afterparty of spilled pennies.
O, Hollywood, here is a manifesto that I filled up with your to-do lists.
In Georgia, nothing is capable of glow in the dark.
You are going to preserve my shipwreck as a keepsake, let me stay helpless.
I already know how this place goes:
A four-leaf clover harvest; A wishbone in the pop-up stand; A footprint in the star.
Everyone is always cold & grinning in the electricity.
Vanishing is still relevant under the skyline during martyr season.
Sometimes you are always flashing bright, everything in severance from the deserted town.
So what?
The wind turbines don’t spin out of frustration.
I’d like to visit you whenever the heat doesn’t return in waves;
I’ll know you enough to write an aubade in the morning.
I want to write in present-tense with your hands cupped. I will pour out an heirloom.
Everything is already sacred & haunted.

Still Life of Age

On the table: rosary beads, pork sinigang,
my wet hands as a water sprinkler. In the TV: a church
replay as my mother sinks into the leather. It is currently the hour
of rooster orchestras. I’m holding my own hand to perform
my own rituals, the river down the block
sprinting through upturned stone, saying Hallelujah! New days! New things!
& my heresies tornado along its axis like a rampant ghost.
I have missed the limelight, I miss the limelight
like a rabid hound, the birthday crowns I left in darker corners,
each day passing with red vitriol. The body metamorphoses in gradual,
slowing vectors. Toy soldiers find refuge in recycling bins & my mother preserves
her thermal touch. I have missed so much. The years
have filled the house like an elephant with no address. What a mark.

Jaiden Geolingo is a Filipino writer based in Georgia, United States, and the author of How to Migrate Ghosts (kith books, 2025). A finalist for the Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize and a 2025 National YoungArts Winner in Poetry, his writing appears or is forthcoming in diode poetry journal, The Shore, The Tupelo Quarterly, Writers Digest, and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of Hominum Journal.