Mark Dimaisip

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Mark Dimaisip is a Filipino poet based in Manila.His recent literary work includes "Underwater Tongue", selected by Will Harris for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, "Housekeeping Duties", a horror piece featured in the Southeast Asia Poetry Special of Strange Horizons, and "Every Name They Gave You", nominated by Radon Journal for The Pushcart Prize.His poetry has been featured in The Brasilia Review, Cha: an Asian Literary Journal, harana poetry, Human Parts, Fantasy Magazine, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Radon Journal, and Strange Horizons, among many others. Dimaisip's work often delves into speculative themes, blending science fiction, horror, and poignant reflections on faith, queer identity and modern life.Mark has performed for poetry shows and literary festivals in Southeast Asia and Australia including Filipino ReaderCon, Lit Up Asia-Pacific Festival, Numera World Poetry, Performatura and Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. He has spoken word tracks in Bigkas Pilipinas Vol. 1 & 2, and has organized poetry and open mic shows for Ang Sabi Nila, The Loudmouth Collective and CollaboratoryPH.Born in the Philippines, Mark graduated from Ateneo de Manila University, where he studied Communication. He does employer branding and designs employee experiences for a living. For information outside his poetry, here's his work (non poetry) profile.
FEATURED INRadon Journal Interview on the zine "The First Bakla" and two recent poems
The Philippine Star 39th Anniversary Issue
Locus Magazine Review of the poem "The Untaken"
Radon Journal Interview on the poem "The Experience Machine"
Specpotpourri: Five Centuries of Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, and Exploratory Science Poetry in English.
Judges Report on 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition Winners
Bigkas Pilipinas Episode 59 featuring the spoken word track "Loose Limits"
Radon Journal Interview on the poem "Loose Limits" and the Philippine poetry scene
Specpotpourri: Eerie SFF Poems for October Reading
Quick Sip Review of the poem “Housekeeping Duties”
Bigkas Pilipinas Episode 5 featuring the spoken word track "2am Conversations"
RECOGNITIONSNominated by Radon Journal, The Pushcart Prize (2026)
Finalist, Santelmo Pambansang Hámon sa Pagtula (2025)
Shortlisted for Poetry, The Bridport Prize (2025)
Shortlisted, Rattle Chapbook Prize (2022)
Special Commendation, Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (2021)

Writing

POETRY"Every Name They Gave You", and "Hunty Haikus for the Holy Homosexuals", Radon Journal, Issue 11 (Oct 01, 2025)
"Where Frequencies Talk Over", Strange Horizons (Feb 10, 2025)
"The Experience Machine", Radon Journal, Issue 9 (Jan 16, 2025)
"Breaking/Not Breaking", The Saltbush Review, Issue 4 (Dec 14, 2023)
"Loose Limits", Radon Journal, Issue 5 (Sep 15, 2023)
"Everything is Allowed," Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol 22 No 3 (Jul 31, 2023)
"Schrödinger's Cat," Visual Verse, Volume 10 Chapter 8 (Jun 15, 2023)
"The Untaken," Strange Horizons (May 08, 2023)
"The Butterfly Affect," Visual Verse, Volume 9 Chapter 4 (Feb 24, 2022)
"Mister Potato Head," Fantasy Magazine, Issue 76 (Feb 15, 2022)
"English Just Doesn’t Cut," harana poetry, Issue 9 (Dec 09, 2021)
"Underwater Tongue," Oxford Brookes Poetry Center, 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition Winners - EAL category (Nov 19, 2021)
"The Bruised Ones," Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Auditory Cortex 2021 (Nov 03, 2021)
"Housekeeping Duties," Strange Horizons, Southeast Asia Poetry Special (Aug 30, 2021)
"Father Figure," Comma, Nasaan ang Katawan? (Jun 29, 2019)
"Sunkissed, Windswept, Weatherbeaten," Bukambibig, Disasters (Apr 22, 2017)
"Lessons from Human Anatomy," Human Parts (Sep 09, 2015)
"Conversations with a Mathematician," A Literation Magazine, Volume IV (Feb 06, 2015)
"Cold Storage Unit," The Brasilia Review, Issue 9 (Nov 09, 2014)
NON-FICTION"Culture as craft: Reimagining HR with empathy, creativity, and impact" The Philippine Star (Jul 28, 2025)
"Co-Creation at Work: Artistic Collaboration in Common Spaces, Bootcamp (Sep 29, 2024)
"Digitalizing Empathy and Care: Looking Back on Four Years of DUDE Bot," Bootcamp (Mar 27, 2024)
SPOKEN WORD TRACKS"Why Poetry?" with Leandro Reyes, Bigkas Pilipinas Volume 2 (2020)
"Lessons from Human Anatomy," Bigkas Pilipinas on Jam88.3 The Album (2018)
"Tingala," Tugon EP (2017)
PODCASTS & VIDEOS"Isang Salita" with Jerome Cleofas, Third Thursdays (Jul 11, 2024)
"Loose Limits" Bigkas Pilipinas, Episode 59: All the Math in the World (Jan 20, 2024)
"Lessons from Human Anatomy," Third Thursdays (Aug 17, 2023)
"Underwater Tongue," Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition Awards Event (Dec 07, 2021)
"The Men I Adore," Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, Annual Poetry Slam (Oct 16, 2021)
"2am Conversations," Bigkas Pilipinas, Episode 5: Body Language (Oct 6, 2021)
"Housekeeping Duties," Strange Horizons, Poetry of the Southeast Asia Poetry Special (Sep 06, 2021)
"Disasters," Ang Sabi Nila IV (Apr 27, 2019)
"If I Should Have a Daughter," Collaboratory.PH, Season 01 Episode 11 (Oct 03, 2017)
"Lessons from Human Anatomy," Filipino ReaderCon, The 5th Filipino ReaderCon (Nov 28, 2015)

Books

Chapbooks

Magazines & Anthologies

The First BAKLA

About the ChapbookThe First Bakla is a book of beginnings—where queerness is not an afterthought, but an origin story. In these poems, Mark Dimaisip reclaims the bakla as healer, dancer, fire, and witness, tracing a lineage that predates shame and survives its violences. With language that is spare, incantatory, and unafraid of silence, Dimaisip writes poems that move like ritual: each gesture precise, each pause deliberate.Here, cruelty is named without spectacle, and resilience is rendered not as endurance alone but as joy, movement, and grace. Drawing from Filipino cultural memory, precolonial myth, and lived queer experience, The First Bakla refuses erasure by imagining a world in which the bakla has always been sacred—burning, unburnable.This chapbook is both elegy and invocation. It does not ask for permission to exist. It blesses itself, then invites the reader to witness the fire.


Sample Poems"Breaking/Not Breaking", The Saltbush Review, Issue 4
"Everything is Allowed," Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Volume 22 Number 3
"Mister Potato Head," Fantasy Magazine, Issue 76

Underwater Tongue

When the neighborhood robins started speaking
fish, my father gunned down all the anomalies
that perched on trees. I can still hear the ringing.
Flashback to six: chasing ants with candles,
fixing movements in wax. There is a pond
by the worn, wooden house where ducklings cackle.
I remember thinking that if chicks could wade
in the water, maybe their shrill crying would stop.
When my grandfather collapsed in a stairway,
I wasn’t taken aback by his ending. Farm teaches death.
The backyard gravel, becoming more and more maroon.
The daily playtime of ripping insects apart.
Dogs and cats put down for fucking all the time.
Before my grandfather died, he caught me
placing chicks inside pitchers. He saw drowning.
I saw learning. His angry face is hard to forget.
After a slaughter, we would sweep death off the ground
but blood finds a way to seep beyond cleansing.
Wounds don’t heal. They turn invisible.
I walked barefoot into the ocean. Grasping for fish
words. But the close-fisted waves said no.
Let me learn, first hand, this underwater tongue.
Let me tow together what I can’t keep whole.
NOTESReceived Special Commendation at 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. First Published at The Poetry Centre website of Oxford Brookes University
JUDGES REPORTThe special commendation goes to 'Underwater Tongue', whose first three lines blew the top of my head off, not least because of the strange ecological-familial power invested in the poet's use of "anomalies". I'm also still puzzling over the powerful relationship between "speaking/ fish" and "fish/ words".
—Will Harris

Housekeeping Duties

Engkantos are invisible to the sober & truth is buried
without wine. When grandfather died, his dog vanished.
It occasionally reappears just to howl by the gate.My childhood best friend lives in our attic closet.
Nightly, from the inside, he halfway opens the cabinet
to throw the other end of a tin can telephone.We never cross the dotted pebbles by the garden;
beyond the line are duendes. Despite garlic,
our kitchen smells like a forest equinox in spring.At eight, I stopped playing with the neighbor’s kids.
Same year. First sip of wine. 2hrs non-stop laughing.
I was bantering with cold, humid air, they said.A dead uncle shares my birthday. He tastes blood
from imaginary wounds in his mouth.
His black & white photos are my dead ringer.We leave empty dining chairs for the family multo.
Since grandmother died, the gate remains undisturbed.
On his deathbed, my uncle promised to return.After I moved out, our housekeeper would hear knocks
from the attic, followed by a voice calling out my name.
A closet creaking. A tin can rolling on the floor.
NOTESFirst published at the Southeast Asia Poetry Special of Strange Horizons.
REVIEWSNot all ghosts are vengeful and not all hauntings are terrifying, though even the most benign of the visitations in Mark Dimaisip’s meditative "Housekeeping Duties" evoke an eeriness that’s hard to deny.
—SpecpotpourriThis piece speaks to me of time passing, of assimilation, of changing customs. Where the narrator’s family seems to be in flux, dropping older beliefs that fade but that don’t disappear. That still reach out, that still whisper and wail as much as they can. Who have been diminished in some ways but that can still touch and effect. And the piece seems to me to explore that through the narrator, caught between that past, those forces, and the new world around them, the “modern” world that has adopted a different god and different values. And there’s something just great and a bit haunting about the final lines, the image of this line strung out from the past, waiting for a narrator who has moved away. But who might yet return, who could still pick up that tin can and speak to ghosts. There’s a possibility there, even as there’s a kind of melancholy and distance, and it makes for a fantastic read!
—Quick Sip Reviews

Updates Archive

202511.20. Two of Mark's poems are finalists at Santelmo Pambansang Hamon sa Pagtula by San Anselmo Publications, Inc.10.18. Two of Mark's poems are shortlisted at the 2025 Bridport Prize International Creative Writing Competition.10.01. New Poems! "Every Name They Gave You", and "Hunty Haikus for the Holy Homosexuals", Radon Journal, Issue 1109.01. Mark's zine "The First Bakla" will be available at The Manila International Book Fair at SMX Convention Center on September 10-14.07.28. The Philippine Star publishes Mark's piece on Culture as Craft, where he talks about how HR as a creative discipline, building human‑centered programs that turn values into action and workplaces into communities where culture takes root.04.15. Jerry Grácio and Trist’n Buenaflor selects "The First Bakla" for Bente-Bente Zine Volume 4. Along with 19 other chapbooks, "The First Bakla" will be launched in June 2025. BBZ is a movement, a response to the non-availability and non-affordability of reading materials, particularly literature, here in the Philippines. Each chapbook is P20.04.05. Mark fills us in on his poetic life since 2023, balancing structure and spontaneity in poems, transferring page poems to the stage, and branding as a writer in Catching Up with Mark Dimaisip, an author interview with Radon Journal.02.10. New Poem! "Where Frequencies Talk Over", Strange Horizons, 10 February 202502.08. Issue 9 of Radon Journal in SFF Reviews: I’ve come to really love and look forward to the poetry selection in each Radon Journal issue; the poems are exceptionally curated... Kudos to the editors for placing Dimaisip’s poem immediately after Whalbring’s poem: In this ordering, Dimaisip’s reads like a sequel to Whalbring’s. If the latter poem offers up a potential future, the former provides us with a singular, specific, concrete reality of that future.01.15. New Poem! "The Experience Machine", Radon Journal, Issue 9
202407.11 Mark performs "Isang Salita" with Jerome Cleofas for Third Thursdays.01.20. New Audio Recording! "Loose Limits" at Bigkas Pilipinas, Episode 59: All the Math in the World
202312.14. New Poem! "Breaking/Not Breaking", The Saltbush Review, Issue 410.15 Mark illuminates the Philippines spoken word poetry scene, life as a poetry organizer, submitting to international markets, a deep-dive into his poem "Loose Limits," and performance vs. traditional poetry in Conversation with Mark Dimaisip, an author interview with Radon Journal.09.15. New Poem! "Loose Limits", Radon Journal, Issue 508.23. Mark performs "Lessons from Human Anatomy," for Third Thursdays.08.04. Locus Magazine reviews Strange Horizons: Mark Dimaisip details a home defined by superstition and folklore in ‘‘The Untaken’’, where ritual­izing daily life is an attempt to make sense of the fortune, guilt, and fear of those who have sur­vived when others have been taken. Dimaisip shows how that kind of mentality, almost bargaining, works in a world full of hungry shadows.07.31. New Poem! "Everything is Allowed," Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Volume 22 Number 306.15. New Poem! "Schrödinger's Cat," Visual Verse, Volume 10 Chapter 805.08. New Poem! "The Untaken," Strange Horizons, 8 May 2023
202202.24. New Poem! "The Butterfly Affect," Visual Verse, Volume 9 Chapter 402.15. New Poem! "Mister Potato Head," Fantasy Magazine, Issue 76
202112.09. New Poem! "English Just Doesn’t Cut," harana poetry, issue 912.07. Mark performs "Underwater Tongue" at the 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition Awards Event.11.19. Winners of the 2021 Oxford-Brookes International Poetry Competition announced! Except from the Judge's Report by Will Harris: The special commendation goes to "Underwater Tongue", whose first three lines blew the top of my head off, not least because of the strange ecological-familial power invested in the poet's use of "anomalies". I'm also still puzzling over the powerful relationship between "speaking/ fish" and "fish/ words".11.03. New Poem with Audio! "The Bruised Ones," Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Auditory Cortex 202110.27. Housekeeping Duties in a recommended reading list by specpotpourri: Not all ghosts are vengeful and not all hauntings are terrifying, though even the most benign of the visitations in Mark Dimaisip’s meditative "Housekeeping Duties" evoke an eeriness that’s hard to deny.10.16. Mark performs "The Men I Adore" at the hybrid poetry slam event of Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.09.10. Quick Sip Review of the Southeast Asia Poetry Special of Strange Horizons. On "Housekeeping Duties" poem: There’s something just great and a bit haunting about the final lines, the image of this line strung out from the past, waiting for a narrator who has moved away. But who might yet return, who could still pick up that tin can and speak to ghosts.09.06. Mark reads "Housekeeping Duties" for the Strange Horizon's podcast on Southeast Asia Poetry Special. Also available on Anghami, Apple Podcast, Podbean, and Spotify.08.30. New Poem! "Housekeeping Duties," Strange Horizons, Southeast Asia Poetry Special.04.05. In Episode 15 of Anton U, Antonio Bathan reviews "Isang Salita", a spoken word collaboration between Jerome Cleofas and Mark Dimaisip
202012.14. Nasaan ang Katawan, a limited edition zine for MNLxVIE Equality Fest 2019, is now available at artbooks.ph! Mark's poem "Father Figure" is on page 16.04.16. Bigkas Pilipinas Volume 2 is out! Mark Dimaisip and Leandro Reyes' collaborative poem "Why Poetry" is on track 15. Available on Apple Music, Amazon, and Spotify.