Carmen Dolina
We Know How to Live
a Dan and Phil cento about love
What’s for dinner? That meringue thing,
cornflakes, good helium, instant
snow powder in our sauce cupboard.
We’ve got a hundred and seventy-eight mugs
for two people, and you drink out of a
vase. It’s endearing. Can’t help what I do.
Agenda? Find our board game. Do a
trust exercise. Pull your sassiest face.
Become a season: a seven-foot tree, mulled wine,
four bits of tinsel on the floor. It’s supposed to be cheesy,
coming home. What would happen if we did go
further apart than this? The universe would
rip in half. I would lose the sense of dance.
Let’s not try that.
Carmen Dolina (she/her) is a Filipino computer science graduate and game development student, so she doesn’t know how she ended up writing poetry. In 2023, she received a Loyola Schools Award for the Arts for her poetry and was a fellow at the 28th Ateneo HEIGHTS Writers Workshop. In the same year, she released her first self-published chapbook Woke Up in a Safe House. Her work has appeared in HAD, horde, the lickety~split, TLDTD, and Sweet Tree Review, among others. Her biggest regret is selling her Carly Rae Jepsen tickets to go to theater rehearsals that ended up getting canceled.