My Love is Water

Rob Macaisa Colgate

POETRY, QUEER STUDIES, THEATER  |  $20

June 2025
Read an excerpt

DANILO: When I went crazy— baliw— nang nabaliw ako—

         When I sank below the surface of the water— 

I had visions of boys I had dated— who yelled through the waves—

 

PARTYGOERS: TOO BIG! TOO BIG! TOO SOON THE LOVE!

         TOO FAST THE WATER! TOO BIG! TOO BIG!

 [Dude slow down]

DANILO: And then they pumped me full of their waters—

 

PARTYGOERS: TUBIG!— TUBIG!—

 

DANILO: They held me down— put their hoses in my mouth—

filled me up— drowned me— told me to stop 

crying— too much water— tubigboy— baliwboy—

 

soaked through with baliw— I drowned Jason—

I was below him— I was crazy— was crazy for him—

I was baliw— him— was crazy for loving him

 

my love was nothing— if crazy— if spilling over—

            my crazy was too big— my crazy was water— 

my love was tubig— my love was water—

            [You’re acting crazy]

it would be crazy— to tell anyone— who cares— 

about a schizo— who cares— for a schizo—

it would be— baliw— it would be— below him— 

 

ALL: now get—  below him— crazy boy— baliwboy—

get on with it— get on him— get him off—

then get off him— get up— get going— and stop crying—

 

stop  crying     stop    crying

 

              the tears      are too big       too much       feeling          

 

                                 stop               crying          stop                    loving

 

  too much     love    ugh         you’re too     big        for this

 

don’t stop           drowning       don’t care       drown

At a house party with as many antipsychotics as party drugs, Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—is tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship. Dancing and stumbling with his Filipina nurse friends, Danilo traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog. Outside the window, the lake is too big and crashing.

In a hybrid of drama and poetry, Rob Macaisa Colgate writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care: “That’s so like me, to treat my body / like a gun: either he doesn’t want / to touch it or uses it to make me / stay. I knew he would run.”

About the Author

Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House). His work appears in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, and Poets.org, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Lambda Literary, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review. He serves as a reader for POETRY Magazine and managing poetry editor at Foglifter. The inaugural poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, he received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin.

Praise

How do we live in a house haunted by those we once invited inside? Rob Macaisa Colgate’s drama in verse, My Love is Water, defies category and ignites the imagination. Set in Danilo’s party, a whir of ecstatic energy gestates in and around aloneness, language, spilling-over care, untouchedness, diaspora, schizophrenia, Amerikan moments, homeness, desire, connectivity, dangerous love, kabaklaan, and performance. 'Let’s lose our minds with Dani / and his lost mind,' says Mari, the psychiatric nurse, as she swirls within the night’s white noise. Danilo confesses in lyrical monologues, 'I have never been so absent… All love starts as water.' Colgate wields their intuitive poetical force in vibrant theatrical scenes where the collective of PARTYGOERS become silhouettes, Danilo’s mind extends outward into dream-states of shifting lights, ocean waves crash toward big stillness, and the darkness sounds like a promise. Deliciously strange, deliciously heart wrenching—this book radiates pure magic. Where ideas float like unimpressed ghosts, the polyvocalic compounds, and the Filipino nurses become Colgate’s rendition of the Three Fates—collectively weaving daring lyricism— to leave a reader breathless, lusty in the weight. Full of spectral visitors, longing, wild embodiments of verse, celestial navigations, and haunting echoes of a former lover, My Love is Water is an entranced fever-dream of what lurks inside loss, selfhood, and the mind.

Felicia Zamora, author of Interstitial Archaeology

Rob Macaisa Colgate’s expertly choreographed My Love is Water stages a Boystown house party you won’t soon forget, populated by an unlikely mix of Filipina exchange nurses and gay Grindr friends. At the center of this theatrical space of excess and enlightenment, our host, the recently dumped Danilo, enacts a messy and moving meditation on care, disability, and queerness; on the cruel promises of empire; and, especially, on outsized and lopsided love.

Chad Bennett, author of Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era


Praise for Previous Work

In these tender, witty, daring poems, Colgate takes up the transformative work of exploring identity and experience in all their discoball-glittering, light-throwing, prismatic refractions. The result is a miraculous combination of witness and ode to the gorgeous and brutal facets of embodied life.

Lisa Olstein

Links

Interview with New England Review

Reading with Cross-Pollinations

Reading with Lambda Literary

In conversations with Drew McEwan and Max Ferguson

NEA Creative Writing Fellowship bio

Interview with The Malahat Review

 

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-34-7
Trade Paperback
88 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: June 01 2025