Isabel Cristina Legarda | The Pillar Dwellers’ Handbook

The Pillar Dwellers’ Handbook by Isabel Cristina Legarda. Number 5 in our Allison Joseph Series.

Publication:  July 23, 2026 [100 copies]
33 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-36-5
$ 12.00

Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the U.S. She is currently a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Smartish Pace, The Dewdrop, The Lowestoft Chronicle, and others. Her chapbook Beyond the Galleons was published in April 2024 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. She can be visited at http://www.ilegarda.com or on Instagram (@poetintheOR).

Romeo and Juliet Rewound

Juliet removes the bejeweled hilt from her chest.
Then her lips are on his, still warm. Despair
and terror turn to elation when she sees him.
She is comatose. Romeo’s mouth pulls away
from the dark vial, his mind confused,
because wasn’t it only last night he was inside her
for the first time, feeling more alive than he had ever
felt, her body pink, her back arched. In Mantua
he stares at shelves of glass vials, green and blue and
a terrifying black, an apothecary disbelieving
he wants to kill rats but selling him the poison anway.
The friar’s letter still on the road. He runs to Verona
at dawn; he is plotting their escape together, but how on earth
will they live, how will they feed themselves?
The friar was right. But he cannot think about that
when he has her in his arms beneath the Capulets’
luxurious sheets, when the very sight of her running
across the everlasting flint to be with him
makes his heart leap with a wonder so immense
it ignites inside him; it flames like a torch.
The nurse tells his unruly friends she’ll be there.
The inconstant moon over the balcony goes totally unnoticed.
At the masquerade ball they stare and they stare,
and Tybalt, bless him, is alive and resentful.
Mercutio cracks jokes as if he will never be run through
under his best friend’s arm. Now Romeo
has not even met Juliet; he is chasing Rosaline;
he has not a care in the world. Juliet’s parents
talk of marriage to the dull but not indifferent Paris.
Even better, the Capulets and Montagues are not at war,
family feud unthinkable between two households
both alike in dignity. They look forward to a time
when their young people grow up together as friends,
almost siblings, and there will be no “if only”
to be a glove upon that hand, no holy palmers’
palm to palm kiss, just an existence free of daggers
and poisons and exile. What tranquility, what calm,
the peace of a loveless life.

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