Author: Luisa A. Igloria

"Love means you breathe in two countries."
                       ~ Naomi Shihab Nye


I have very few pictures from there
         but now and then I look through them 
to see how light falls like a wound 
         refusing to heal. Sometimes I think
sepia must be the color of love: 
         that means the length of a breath 
quickening the distance between this 
         moment and all the ones in which 
we haven't yet made our lives harder 
         than a rusk of bread to crumble
in a cup of coffee. Now, I find
         an insomnia of stars buried in
the flesh of fruit. I pick at the white
         pith that spreads like a net
across a globe I can hold in my hand.
         But is it always going to be  
too late? A month before you were born, 
         I walked the hills by myself 
in a heavy sweater, watching my breath write
         unreadable letters in the air. I still
can't figure out whether they spelled time or
         estrangement or anchor; or were merely 
random shapes of a future refusing to be read.     

         When the city fell  
around us: sounds like breaking  
crystal and buildings 
                      imploding into ash,
followed by staccato
of helicopters. 
                Airlift 
was a word passed from mouth
to mouth, 
          runner gaining ground. 
And yet, where could we go in a field
bounded 
        by aftershock and lightning 
strike, our mouths stuffed
with sawdust? How
                  could we leave
the stones that marked the birth-
place of our bodies 
                    and where 
we went to sleep at night? 
If you want to learn 
                     our history,
walk among the rows of our dead, neat
as books shelved in a library
                              guarded
by the arms of cypress and pine,
end-papered in moss.

To describe a future that isn't
coy anymore about showing its face,  

we need to begin the massive labor
of corrections. Once, monks

and their acolytes sat at long 
tables in the scriptorium, day 

after day extracting bright 
minerals from plants and insect 

bodies, tracking silverpoint across 
vellum plates, dipping the ends 

of brushes into wells of goldleaf. 
Now we begin to dismantle elaborate 

overlays of luster, grand networks 
of erroneous facts. Magellan, 

whose name was given to those dark-
blue straits across the Tierra 

del Fuego, did not circumnavigate 
the earth; the honor must go 

to his Filipino interpreter Enrique. 
Columbus did not discover the Americas:

hundreds of nations were in place 
before he crowed about finding rhubarb 

and cinnamon and a thousand other 
things of value, before he laid down 

a trade route for cotton and silver 
and slaves, as many as they shall order 

to be shipped and who will be from 
the idolaters. Peer into mirrors 

and see villages decimated by fire, 
valleys from which creatures fled

toward forests of glinting knives.  
From smoke, collect precious blood. 

We can't stop until our cities gleam
with the shine of our stolen names.   

Go, they said.
We'll help take care 
     of the children.

That first winter, I buy
padlocks, a flashlight, a disposable 
             camera at the drugstore

so I can take snapshots of the snow
on the way to campus. Don't 
                            go out

with damp hair, I'm told;
or they'll snap like brittle
                       icicles in cold

air. Before I find an apartment
shared with other 
             grad students, 

I make my first calls from public
phones in lobbies. I clutch 
                         a paper 

bag of coins
in one hand and listen
for 
    the warning tone.

The day of departure  
loops in my mind: my mother
and two 
      older daughters

rising before dawn to board
a cab for the airport;
we all 
       decide it will be 

a mercy to leave the youngest, 
still asleep, with our katulong.
What words 
           did we say exactly

and what sort of embrace ::
before the doors sealed themselves
in place
       between us.

Year after year
and it is a decade :: then
two :: then three.
              You make 

a litany
of what I've missed for which
there never will 
                 be a good

enough answer. I can tell you
about the blur of nights 
but not about 
               the sounds of longing 

I'm told escape my lips in sleep. 
I could tell you that my life,
narrowing more
               toward that cold museum 

bend, will never amass adequate
redress :: this body and its relics 
incapable of righting
        all the scales.

Philippines, March 7, 1906

 
                          
From the archives—
a photograph taken on the crater
rim of Mount Dajo
after assault 

              272 men of the 6th 
Infantry     211 men of the 4th Cavalry 
68 men of the 28th Artillery Battery
51 Sulu Constabulary   110 men of the 19th
Infantry and 6 sailors from 
the gunboat Pampanga

                    In the foreground 
a child's foot 
rests on the brow of another  
                              A body away

could that be his sister
Her dark hair still 
neat in its ponytail
                                 
                      A whole
village in the ditch— Softness
of homespun garments their tattered
elegy  

              A pale breast and smudged
throat tilts toward the sky like some
marble goddess defaced

                         I cannot look 
at the white men standing above them
with their officious hats 

                        Their cocked 
knees and overheated guns

Each one's the crooked bow of elbows
Each one's the nonchalance of war

                This is the Bud Dajo massacre
where more than 900 Muslim Filipinos
were killed
             
             defending a settlement
where they'd retreated to plant
rice and potatoes
weave
       mats from forest fronds

18 Americans lost
their lives 
              For every white 
soldier here a calculus
of 50 native bodies

White-throated bud, pinched 
tight in the morning: an exploded 
whorl at dusk. 

Or, every consequence 
often begins in understatement.

Or, is its own 
pursuit of something
to call an aftermath.

We want to assign cause 
or blame: stain on the white napkin 
made by a mouth that can't stop 
eating too much red fruit.

Singed air above a pit
where bodies burn down
to only their elements of bone
and ash. 

One can buy sorrow more cheaply
than wine or bread. Trading it
is a different story. 

is at this moment coming toward us

        is crossing the seas & continents to deliver

                 its one message in a million million copies

"Theodore Roosevelt, who had fought in Cuba in 
the Spanish-American War, assumed the U.S. 
presidency on September 14, 1901. He agreed 
with his predecessor that the Filipinos 
were not capable of self-governance." 
~ Theodore Roosevelt Center 
at Dickinson State University



Tell me how to stop
caterpillars from making lace

of the emerald leaves of bok choi, 
how to keep new saplings from drowning

in a fortnight of rain. I learned
that trick with beer and salt 

for slugs, but can't bear the sight
of soft bodies shriveling up as if

doused in smoke. But it's a different
thing, this business you say you don't

or won't understand— of heaving a frieze
of confederate daughters into the air,

breaking statues off their pedestals, 
removing plates engraved with their grand-

sounding names. Metal or marble, stone 
carved in the visage of a man 

flanked on the one hand by a black
body and on the other by an Indian one,

whose decisions led to villages razed 
to the ground and a general's orders to shoot 

everyone, man, woman, child, on sight. 
History likes to remember only what art 

can beautify with gold leaf and laurels;
what it can plunder for future museums.  

  

"...My loves and not my sentences." ~ Jericho Brown


Every now and then she takes them
out of the folded      
                  square of paper

Tucked under the flap
of an earring box, shriveled now 
and barely      
                 distinguishable,  

one from the other—  
bits of cord
cut from       
         a vein of pulsing 

Rinsed and dried of their salt
and merthiolate       tinting
What is it to be
the one that succors  

                     The one that gathers
and tallies and costs
A lifetime of holding
or holding  
           close     Of waiting for what 
right hour to give in to one's
own grief
                  



 

In those days we thought nothing
of walking to the slaughterhouse 

        and the row of little cantinas
        with their oilcloth-covered tables

then waiting for a meal of rice
and meat sizzled on a grill

        while listening to the music 
        that animals make when they are dying.

We thought nothing of being the animals
ourselves, flayed open on the spit

        of the everyday and still joking,
        still laughing, still grim 

and hungry or needing a smoke or a beer, 
our histories decorated by rose bushes 

        and parks and man-made lakes,
        hand-painted signs with the names

of people who insisted on wearing their boiled  
wool suits and top hats in this tropical country.

        We thought nothing then of the future
        and its crumbling remains, the scars

on mountainsides that marked the veins out of which
they drew copper and silver and gold. Our gums 

        are the dusty color of agate and carnelian,
        our teeth stained with the beautiful darkness

of the soil. We think all the time about the past;
which is to say, now we remember the orchards we

        walked through without registering the conversation
        of ferns, the prophesying of birds of paradise.