The Espresso Effect by Iris Orpi and Sunshine Plata

09/06/2023

Nothing says I have officially arrived in Chicago like having my poetry posted inside a CPS classroom. Today is a good day.

Follow on IG if you haven't yet.

06/07/2020

Her coffee paintings were also featured on the Martha Stewart Show.

02/10/2019

Following her 2018 nomination for the Pushcart Prize, Iris Orpi is interviewed by Harbinger Asylum editor and publisher Dustin Pickering on her creative process, literary inspirations, and the rhyme and reason behind prevailing motifs in her work.

Interview with amazing and inspiring poet Iris Orpi, Filipina immigrant

11/27/2018

skin tones from ivory to bronze, medley of languages, our personal spaces like sacraments, this prism of steel and laminated glass a petri dish of disparate stories

Like blood running through the city’s veins, and its arteries in a grid. We feed its heart/ we are its pulse fragile bundles of will layered in fleece and goose down skin tones from ivory to …

11/23/2018

I love you best who, when I revealed to you my weakness, used it to save me and better me and not harm me.

I love you best who, when I revealed to you my weakness, used it to save me and better me and not harm me. . . “İnsan Gönlünü Güzelleştirince…” . from the Twitter profile of Nilsu…

11/23/2018

Don't close the door on yourself.

Don’t close the door on yourself. . . untitled photo . from image bookmarking site Pinterest . You might also like: (Note: The thumbnails don’t work on the WP app, only via browser.)

10/24/2018

There's no purpose for that revolt of full-throated questions but for the guillotine to fall & silence it,the denial of answers so unbearably loud.

It starts. Not the madness, but the song that the madness interrupts to make its presence known. There go the opening strains, sweet and aching, renditions of why tapping a rhythm, why use that wor…

10/10/2018

Certainties are like summers,
epithets for enduring;
they all empty into
a horizon that belongs to
another world,
another eloquence.

Let me try again to tell you about the light that was shining until it wasn’t. Certainties are like summers, epithets for enduring that don’t really endure; they all empty into a horizo…

10/10/2018

show me what you are
at the soul
even if it means
we both fade into the cold
unremembered

Here I lose you like I always do the sky’s blue that retires too soon and the fall that comes around always like heartbreak robbed of closure auburn hued dreaming unaware of the end while sin…

09/03/2018

Such an unworthy thing to be addicted to, victimhood, devotion to the amputated limb while your children starve & their bitterness metastasizes .

Victim you’re so faithful to that name something transitory a stain it doesn’t alter the light, bundling up the hate around you like a tired, still-favored blanket and hoarding the ashe…

09/02/2018

How far away from home we are, here, how far away from ourselves that these confessions could only cover half of the way back.

The hotel room overlooked the lake shore; your daughter’s innocence overlooked your tears and somewhere, here, your heart broke and you gave yourself permission to be wrong about the wants lo…