My Love Is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate

In My Love is Water, a house party is the stage for the melodrama of unrequited love. Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—stumbles and dances with a gaggle of Filipina nurses around an apartment filled with broken Tagalog, gay ghosts squeezed onto couches, and as many antipsychotics as party drugs. An examination of how race and disability shape our desire to care, this verse drama reckons with how to love when we are left with “dappled white everywhere / but never enough.”

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.