glabella. CONTENTS welcome Carl Lorenz Cervantes burn Nikki Vesagas afterbirth Howi Bakunawa photographs Yona Tayona religion Miguel Santiago dreamy sex off the coast Yves Baconguis of a dormant volcano half/half Jill Chan colorblind painter Rissa Coronel first dreams of the new year Stef Tran
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ようこそ
WELCOME In the beginning was the Word, and that word was “Glabella”, which comes from the Latin glabellus (meaning hairless). This is the space between your eyebrows. It is said that the third eye is right behind that space. So is the pineal gland, which plays an important part in the vividness of your dreams. “Genesis”, Glabella 01. The first issue of Glabella was released on January 2016 and the zine ran for seven monthly issues. I had just graduated from college then. Finding my footing as I ventured into the creative industry, I wanted to build a scene where other eclectics could set their wobbly legs. At first I was able to cull a decent variety from my bored coevals, but after a while either they or I got tired of it. None of us knew what we were doing, so Glabella made a quiet exit—neither a failure nor a success; ignored like an unmarked grave.
This issue is its epitaph. I have dropped this project while it was alive, but I have picked others up along the way— my work has already been published in various folios and I have sold new zines in art fairs. Now, I pay my respects to the first zine I have had the courage to display before others. Glabella contained a genuine piece of me and my kind collaborators, who generously placed their work in my early attempts at zine-making. This is for them, as it is also for you. I am not sure what I was trying to do back then but I invite you now to explore this humble exhibit of dreams. Before you enter, heed this gentle warning: a lot of things in this cerebral epitaph are unfiltered and may be considered somewhat scandalous.
CARL LORENZ CERVANTES March 2018
“burn” by Nikki Vesagas
AFTERBIRTH
Howi Bakunawa
I remember in the distant past there was only emptiness, the darkness of a room air suicide silence uncharted emotional territory. there are none who can escape sharpened corners loneliness anger, frustration, desperation, biting, gnashing delicate pain— a gray shoal,
a blank slate I will try to destroy the remains— joy, ecstasy, sorrow, weakness, acceptance, strength exhume consume but never break, the earth is fed by red flesh, blood, death further— I can create nothing on a whim. blessed are those who sleep and are dead, caught in a dream and in the viscious afterbirth of eternity
During early 2017, I held a small class for a writing organization. The class was experimental, using psychological methods to enter fantasies. My students were instructed not to alter the details of what they saw, effectively allowing their subconscious to play. The following short stories come from two of my students, who have allowed me to show their provocative phantasms.
photograph by Yona Tayona
RELIGION
Miguel Santiago
There is a stone path that leads past my bed of roses, past trees that filter the dawn-light in shades of viridian and gold. Beyond the stone path, there are towering trees and flowers with open blossoms that look like a chorus of Technicolor angels. Far beyond them, there are gurgling fountains and babbling brooks and streams—cherubic infants. And farther beyond them is the sea. Trees grow from its depths, their trunks glowing in the early morning sun. Deeper into the garden stands the church, with its men of stone and its glorious frieze. Stone steps carry me to the front doors. A beautiful man waits for me. He’s delightfully naked; his dark hair coming down his neck, his jaw sharp and defined and peppered with a delicious 5 o’clock shadow. He’s built like a god, and his cock hangs hot and heavy in between his legs. As if hearing my thoughts, he palms his cock, stroking it thoughtfully as he gazes into my eyes. “I am not your god,” he tells me. “He waits for you inside.” As if on cue, the doors open. The dark-haired man ushers me inside. It’s exactly what a church should look like. The pews are all filled with beautiful, sculpted naked me, and as the doors open they turn around to look at me. This feels like a wedding, and I am the beloved. The long-awaited bride. An ornate stone altar is
erected at the end of the aisle. Suspended in mid-air above it is— not a sculpture of a bloddied, dirty marble god on a wooden cross; rather, a god of flesh hangs there with his arms outstretched, his wrists bound by satin sheets. His cock hangs like forbidden fruit, made much more delicious in my state of grace. As my eyes land on it, it starts to harden and throb. His eyes flutter open and fall on me. The satin cuffs fall away, and he falls to his knees in front of the altar. I rush down the aisle to help Him up. The men’s eyes follow me. I help the god to His feet. And He thanks me with a kiss. He tastes like eternity, like dawns and dusks, springs and summers, autumns in arms pulled into flannel shirts and winters in front of fireplaces that smell like chestnuts. I’ve been waiting for you all my life, he tells me. Our love is religion, and we are fucking gods.
photograph by Yona Tayona
DREAMY SEX OFF THE COAST OF A DORMANT VOLCANO Yves Baconguis
Then, a white sheet drifted onto the shore. I had no idea how it was floating, because the ends seemed to fly up because of the wind, but the middle part of the sheet was directly on top of the water. I got on it. The sheet drifted towards a cluster of more sheets, although I could still see the volcano from afar, and the parked train I had gotten on. It smelled like sea salt, and the sky and sea were still very blue. I was under the impression that I was alone on the sheet, since it wasn’t very big, but it turns out I wasn’t. There was a girl near me, naked, and she had blonde braided hair and green eyes. She talked to me like we had met before. She seemed very sweet and bright, and she smiled often. I don’t remember what we talked about, but the next thing I knew she was tying me up with a cotton rope. It was pure white, and very soft. My thighs were bound to my upper body, and this was then that I realized that I was also naked. She started eating me out. We were still on the sheet. My mouth, also, was tied with the rope. I couldn’t speak nor
move, and not once did she look at me. She spat on my vagina and started licking my labia. I came when she started sucking my clit. Still, she did not stop. I had realized she had no plan to stop. My hands and arms were bound and I could feel them shake. She started getting blurry. It wasn’t my eyesight—it was her face, which started buzzing like a vibrator. When I squinted, she seemed to have two heads. My vagina, too, also seemed to get blurry. On my second orgasm, her head transformed into a crystal. She still had her body, which was pale and full of freckles, and her neck looked completely normal, but her head was now a cluster of crystals. They changed color, I closed my eyes and when I opened them, they were orange and red like a sunset. When I closed my eyes and opened again, they were black, so black you could barely tell the edges of the crystal. All the while her blurry crystal head pleasured my vagina. I could feel penetration already, and her pale hands had begun violently clawing on my legs. I realized she wasn’t human. Her arms seemed to grow into more arms, her hands multiplying in a
vast speed. I could feel myself orgasm again. At this point, I was already screaming. I shut my eyes on my third orgasm. When I opened them she was gone. I realized that I was not in the corner of my volcano anymore, but that I was in the middle of my volcano. Somehow, I felt that I had teleported into the center of the volcano, which since it was a domestic volcano, was now just a lake. The sky was a soft shade of purple, and the water was so clear even the stars were reflected onto it. It had occurred to me that it was night.
When I called for submissions, Rissa Coronel was the first one to share her work. She is currently the active moderator of an online mental health awareness group called Silakbo PH. Her work, “Colorblind Painter�, was first published in The Thing Online. I was also pleasantly surprised when Stef Tran, award-winning writer and poetry editor for Rambutan Literary, shared her work.
scan from “Half/Half” by Jill Chan
COLORBLIND PAINTER Rissa Coronel
The maestro and his fumbling pupil have been hard at work. This was her birthday gift: to learn how to paint from the professional. He uses the same tools she uses, except with the precision and ease of familiarity. The cheap brush glides in fully deliberate, yet fluid movements that bloom golden hues on paper. This is far from the fumbling it is used to, the heavyhandedness that had caused it to lose one too many hairs. Everything on the blank paper is finished, at least in the head of that which the hand belongs to. Each perfectly orchestrated stroke spreads exactly the way he wants it. Nothing is wasted. Every pigment, every drop of water is maximized. There has been speculation as to why humans developed comparatively improved color vision compared to that of other mammals. It is assumed to help sense others’ emotions and physical state (i.e. against the skin: the robustness of a blush, faint of paleness, or choke of blue). This capability has also allowed us to appreciate what can be made when we manipulate color. A whole spectrum at our disposal, made from crushed minerals and resin— awakening an even wider array of emotions at our depths. “Don't use the rag to dab the extra paint! That's an advanced technique. Just go with the flow, with the happy accidents. If there's too much water, use a dry brush like this,”
the colorblind painter demonstrates as he quickly swipes away the extra water the pupil used on the young, yellow-dyed rosebud she was painting. The bud is part of a bigger picture: a photo taken at Dangwa, Manila’s famed flower market. Unnaturally-colored roses and callalilies radiate from a tightly packed center. Painting dyed flowers wasn’t what I had in mind when he yielded to my birthday wish. I had waited months for this moment to happen because he is, at the very best, too tired, and apart from the hasty beso, it would be customary not to spend much time with him until the weekend. The colorblind painter’s hands are rough, but he is in his element. The only signs of softness are hidden in movements that compensate for the times he had been burnt by bathroom acid, scalded by cooking oil. His vision betrays him; he has to ask his wife which pot of paint contains the yellow watercolor. * Colorblindness is classified as a mild disability: it causes confusion at stoplights, as well as sartorial mix-ups. Most colorblind people get by just fine, if they aren’t doing anything color-coded. If they do have trouble, they have developed ways of coping.
Some artists with colorblindness have become vocal about their condition, using it as a selling point. Others have opted to make monochromatic art, abandoning color altogether. There are other colorblind painters who have written about their handicap as being more of an advantage—without the distraction of color, the hushed, oftoverlooked properties of value and contrast shine through. The colorblind painter surrounds himself in his senses at home; this is the only time he can do so. His escape from corporate prison, so to speak. He has a raging temper boiling just beneath the surface—demons at held at bay, calmed only by his creative endeavors: the familiar acridity of paint thinner, the feel of his fretboard. Grumbacher color wheels are a necessity at his workspace. His three guitars and accompanying musical gear are scattered around the living room, like overstaying guests in a house with barely any room left. * The wayward pupil found it difficult not to poke fun at—she once had the nerve to give him a color quiz, with a jar of multicolored markers. She brought out an orange marker. “What’s this?” she asked, shamelessly. With eyebrows furrowed, he answered, “Green,” and she laughed in his face.
She brought out a royal blue marker. He saw violet. She brought out green. He saw reddish-brown. She glanced at a painting at the far end of their living room—done by her father, the colorblind painter, no less. It was an impressively rendered procession in his hometown, a carroza of Santo Niño surrounded by churchgoers. Everything was realistic, except for the fact that all the people had bright green skin. My childish antics and inappropriately inquisitive nature tended to put things into perspective for him. “Your favorite word was ‘why,’” he once reminisced, as he attempted to answer question after question about the way the world worked—forming, in effect, so much of my impression of the world in my formative years. I’ve seen numerous sketches of me as a baby, as well as photographs of a new dad working on his MS-DOS computer, with the other hand carrying a watching infant—as if it would’ve been emotionally unbearable to put me down for even a moment. * Many people afflicted with colorblindness find the term for their condition to be a misnomer.
A better way to put it is “the inability to sense or discriminate certain colors.” It is caused by problems with certain receptors in the retina: one attuned to red, one to blue, and one to green. Having one or more defective receptors just means that they cannot tell apart certain colors in the spectrum. They all look the same to them. Since the birth of my only sibling in 2001, he started referring to us as a collective–mga bata. These four syllables rendered our seven-year age gap meaningless. He could be dropping only my brother off to a playdate at our cousin’s house, and he would still say “hatid ko na ‘yung mga bata,” even if I was right beside him. If one of us leaves a textbook in the living room–“ang kalat-kalat talaga ng mga bata,” with consequences for us both. We were responsible for each other, and this is what kept us close despite our widely differing ages. In spite of the large age gap that separates me and my brother, our lives are curiously punctuated at the exact same time by our respective transition periods. He was born in 2001, the same time as I entered grade school; he donned his first white polo-and-chino getup, entered grade school in 2007, just as I entered high school; he will enter high school this school year, at the exact same year that I leave college.
We commiserate with each other in this way, but we both know that this will stop–there is a resignation of sorts to the endpoint that draws dangerously close. My brother will have the opportunity to study and navigate the strokes I have haphazardly made in his wake, taking great care not to make the same mistakes. * The colorblind painter is a severe teacher—there is a price to pay for wanting to learn from him. His pupils grew up in constant fear of his hands hitting their bums, their backs, the sides of their face. His notoriously short temper is what deters my brother from asking him for help. It’s uncanny that they spend so little time together, and yet they are still so alike. Their unbridled tempers are both forces to be reckoned with, even at his tender preteen years. I could never begrudge the colorblind painter for showing my brother only the strongest of hues, because I saw the brittle humanity that motivated his constant efforts to put up these fronts of fearlessness. * The unopened rosebud on the pupil’s canvas has zero definition. "That cannot be saved—it looks like an asteroid
collision," he says with a laugh. He asks for the “gray” rag beside her, and she hands him what is actually a green rag, wordlessly, sparing him the teasing she was fond of in her childhood. The pupil is haphazard at best. All she seemed to put on paper were accidents—and not even the fabled “happy” kind. The colorblind painter feigns a laugh, but she could still sense his frustration. Perhaps her technique could no longer be saved;the bad habits have been ingrained from years of misuse and lack of practice. Colorblind Painter, if you ever want to know what your next work should be, go to the upstairs hallway and enter the second room on the left. There is a boy there who is convinced that he doesn’t need you; you might’ve missed his reds and greens over the years. Guide his hand ever so gently. Place it in front of the blank sheet that he is reluctant to soil.
scan from “Half/Half” by Jill Chan
FIRST DREAMS OF THE NEW YEAR Stef Tran
January 2, 2016 I am sitting in a crowded campus student lounge with Danielle, and I accidentally left my backpack on a chair where a half-lion, half-man is now sitting. I am a little bit in love with the lion man. I squeeze past the other tables and apologize as I reach behind the lion man for my backpack, and when I face him again, he has cracked open in his paws a single perfect mango. Where did you get a mango in the winter? I gasp, and he smiles at me, white teeth in a dark golden face, and says, I grow them, as he pushes it gently into my hands. My hands are shaking. I take the mango back to Danielle and tell her to eat it, that I can’t bear to have it. Danielle just says, No, it’s for you too. He’ll know if you don’t eat it. He knows everything, and takes out two metal cafeteria spoons, one of them slightly bent. I look down at the two halves of the mango. One half has become overripe. The other still has traces of green. --
January 4, 2016 Nine of the popular girls from school are living in my house. They rifle carelessly through my closets and lounge on the top bunk. In the morning, I am the last person to wake up, and when I go to check on them, they’re all dressed and
about to go out. Where’s everyone going? I ask, and one of the girls replies lazily, We’re going to church. I am surprised. Then another girl hands me a flyer, and I see it’s for one of those inspirational youth groups, with singing and trust falls instead of praying, and I think, Ah, that’s more like it. -January 7, 2016 My family lives in a giant black birdcage in a room where the walls are painted like a midnight sky. We live on the second floor of the birdcage and our little black dog lives in a cave on the floor below us. I find our dog and pick her up and carry her in my arms, because I know her cave is dirty and I don’t want her to go back in there. One time I peered in at the entrance of the cave and saw the straw on the floor and the deep tunnel leading away into the blackness and the owlholes in the walls and I got scared and that is why I am holding my dog now. No, we cleaned it up, the cave is nice now, my mom says, come look, and I tell her I already did even though I didn’t because I am still scared of the cave no matter how clean it is. -January 9, 2016
I am running up the down escalator in a mall. The down escalator is in the middle of a waterfall. The spray hits my face, soaking my sleeves as I run. The LED billboard above my head announces, THE CONGREGATION IS FREE. Still running, I look down at my own feet. I am wearing plastic slippers, and my toenails are painted red. -January 11, 2016 There is a man who is a shapeshifter, and he has traveled far and wide taking on different forms. He is searching for something, but he doesn’t know what. The key to the man’s shapeshifting is blood. If the man stands next to a source of water and a drop of blood falls into the water, he will begin to change. Now the man is walking in a courtyard of stone fountains with the girl he loves. I used to be a little afraid of you, the girl says. I felt as though you were always so far away, even when you were here. The man says, I didn’t know. The girl stands over one fountain, takes out a needle, and pricks her finger, letting a tiny drop of her blood fall into the water. It’s not enough, the man says. It’s okay. So the two of them sit on the rim of the fountain instead, dabbling their feet in the water. I was thinking about moving to Brazil, the girl tells him. Oh, the man says. Then the girl looks at him. But I’m not anymore, she says. At this point, it is obvious something bad is about to happen. The enemy’s arrow strikes
the girl directly in the center of her back, and she falls forward into the fountain, her blood spreading in clouds in the water. The man howls in rage and grief, but already he can feel his true power awakening for the first time. He is still howling as he rears up and becomes a towering pillar of storm and smoke. -January 11, 2016 I am growing plants inside a rice cooker. There is a light inside of the lid. I press down hard on the lid with my two hands to turn the light on, pushing light into the greenness of the leaves. -January 6, 2016 I am telling Sol I still haven’t finished the new Tomb Raider game, and he offers to co-op it with me. So I pull back my hair, put on my gloves, and become Lara Croft. No matter where I turn, Sol’s voice is there to guide me through the dark. Together, we swing on jungle vines across impossible gorges. We set off the bombs and sail away on the plumes of fire they make when they explode. See, that wasn’t so hard, Sol says in my ear, at the end. I wonder why I need Sol’s help to be Lara Croft. I am still wondering when I wake up.
-January 15, 2016 We are having our family Christmas party, and it is my job to take videos of everybody, but I can’t figure out how to work the iPad. I take one long video of everyone waving at the camera, of the presents under the tree, my goddaughter playing on the floor, but when I press the button that is supposed to save the video, it deletes it instead. -January 14, 2016 I find out Darra is secretly a drug addict, and that my mom is friends with her dealer. My mom and I run into the dealer when we’re out doing errands, and the two of them start talking, laughing and remembering old times. Sugar is the word they use. It’s your fault Darra loves sugar, my mom tells him, chuckling. The dealer shrugs, but he is still smiling. Then my mom asks him if there’s anything he needs. Two cans of Spam? she asks. The dealer thinks about it for a minute. Three cans, he says finally, his hands in his pockets. And a bottle of Kikkoman. --
January 5, 2016 A brown girl meets a black boy in a church of mirrors. The black boy is the newest member of One Direction. They take a mirror selfie. They are happy. -January 2, 2016 The girl from next door and her brother have come over to our house to swim. I change my clothes in my dad’s room with the door open, listening for footsteps in the hallway outside. I time it so that I am pulling my shirt down just as the brother is passing by.
Sometimes, I worry about how many people would actually care to flip through this. I think that a lot of possible art is wasted on an irrational thought: people think that nobody might care about what they do so they would just not bother doing anything at all. “Screw It”, Glabella 07 Thank you kindly for being part of this project. Thank you, collaborators. I hope that this issue respectfully re-presented your early work, as it is also a clean closure to mine. To see how far we’ve come may motivate us to keep moving forward. We are now off to greater other things. -C.C.