to love something you must carry it on your back, by Keana Aguila Labra

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

to love something you must carry it on your back is a reflection of growing up in the Filipino American diaspora. With, sometimes, fragmented imagery and themes of yearning, generational trauma, Superman, and airports, Aguila Labra presents their experiences, though disjointed, as unequivocally theirs. The houses and places moved through remain home with “our two sinks and two dishwashers // the nicks where we marked our heights” and even strangers met are family, are Ate. With poems eking with love, it asks if you, too, can sit quietly with them in the end.

Keana Aguila Labra (they/them/she/her) is a queer Cebuana Tagalog Filipinx genre- and genderfluid/ non-binary poet, editor, and writer in diaspora residing on stolen Ohlone Tamyen land. She works to provide a safe literary space for underserved and underrepresented communities as co-Editor-in-Chief of literary magazine, Marías at Sampaguitas and co-Founder of the BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ focused independent publishing house, Sampaguita Press. She served as one of the Honorary Santa Clara County Poets Laureate in Oct. ’21 alongside Lorenz Mazon Dumuk. They were the SVCreates SVLaureate & Content Emerging Artist for 2023 and is a proud recipient of the Lucas Artists Residency Program Fellowship through Montalvo Arts Center. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Natalie (Nightingale & Sparrow 2020), No Saints (Lazy Adventurer Publishing, 2020), Mohilak (Fahmidan Co. & Publishing, 2021), Kanunay (Violet & The Bird, 2022) and Conversations with(out) Lolo about Daddy (Sampaguita Press, 2025). The Language of Unbreaking (Sampaguita Press, 2025) is their first full-length publication. The chapbook, to love something you must carry it on your back, is out now with Bottlecap Press.