Author: Luisa A. Igloria

 
who sits with her shoulders above 
the clouds, goats and tin-roofed 
houses dotting the hills of her 
green quilted lap. But even in waking, 
there's always some state of emergency. 
Drought, a flood, animals trying 
to surface from out of oil-
marbled waters; famine, war. Even so, 
it seems I can deal with those parts 
better than the one in which she squeezes 
her breasts so the milk flowing out 
turns into rice. Rice-rain pours 
down every granary, and the people hold 
rice feasts, make rice wine, feed pap 
to babies tired of sucking on 
old, dry-knuckled fingers. 
But hunger is always hungry; it won't 
ever be appeased. I weep from the dream 
where she squeezes so hard that blood 
flows out of her breasts, wild red 
rice still highly prized to this day. I ache
from the effort she made and the thought 
of sacrifices that never end. 
You can smell it in the air: the deep
wells of our sadness, the fog a milky
bandage covering the gutted earth.

  


 

I've heard that some people leave
the porch light on for three days
after someone has died, so the soul
might not feel the shock of having
to be pushed out of the human nest
too soon or forever. Or maybe 
it's so the dead might feel they're 
still connected to their former lives.
After we returned home from burying 
my grandmother, an aunt stood
at the door, waiting to collect
the candles we'd brought back
from the service. She broke each
in half before we entered   
so the dead, newly bereaved of us,
might not come looking for 
a companion. Afterwards we ate
a special sweet made with black
rice and coconut milk, still warm
and sticky on a banana leaf 
wrapper. It's been a while since I
did what we also did that day:
put a little food on a plate,
tell the dead beloved they may eat
along with us. Is it any wonder
some souls get lost in passage. 

of a certain age raise 
eyebrows when she says things 
like That's dope, or This carousel 
of life would be so much more fun 
to ride if they gave you the dark-
maned stallion and not the sparkly 
little pony. I mean I have nothing 
against sparkly. But aren't you too 
just a little bit tired of how every 
store that hasn't renewed its lease 
at the mall has been turned into 
a selfie wall? Giant wings, a painted
swing under a fake bower, rainbow 
umbrellas with glow-in-the-dark
raindrops. My hero is Yayoi
Kusama, who has always been 
a woman of a certain age
even from the time she was ten,
when she obliterated the image 
of her mother in a kimono 
with her signature army of
hallucinatory dots. Or
the Bakunawa, typically
misunderstood in all the tales
that describe how it swallowed
the seven moons and would not
give them back. So much
brilliance, one for every
day of the week— who 
wouldn't be enamored?  
How is anyone to endure 
eternity without a store
of heat and light, a steed
with muscled flanks?

A seam down the middle 
of each season, an outline 

around every gesture 
in the now. And there are 

no mountains here, only 
the silhouettes of boats 

docked at the harbor; this 
blue-gold shift searing 

everything at the margins 
before it disappears. 

I own just one brass hawk
bell now. When it dangles

from a chain at my hip,
its toothed voice rises: 

winged animal familiar 
to any field. But I, 

I am the one still laboring 
to separate stone from seed. 
  

In stories we were told, the theme
was always obedience— or else its opposite,
faithlessness. The girl who lazed in bed,

luxuriating in the gauzy envelope of mosquito
netting that made it feel like she could set
herself apart for just a little while 

from the world: how, not rising quick 
enough to the summons of her mother, 
she was turned into a plant 

stagnating in a pool of water. Hollow 
stems, the damp carrying through her limbs 
as constant reminder of callousness.

In parables, intention doesn't count:
there is only what's done, and the penalty 
that follows after. No one cares about 

nuance or motivation. And in this lifetime, 
will we ever be allowed to tend to that 
first house of the self without incurring 

the wrath of the ancestors? The alarm clock 
rings in the early dark. You want to stay there, 
but the morning beckons like an ancient curse. 

 

I'm only asking for someone 
who wants to know: how soon 

after you wake up is it acceptable 
to take a nap? Can you take personal

days off if you are unemployed? If 
you forge the signature of a close

relative on a check, does that count
as a real crime? If your stepmother

has developed such a fear of dying,
is it cool to suggest she might

benefit from swapping her bed for
a satin-lined coffin? And is it ok to tell

her ill-mannered children they'll never
amount to anything anyway, as proven

by the ugly knobs of shoulder blades
where there could've been angel wings?
 

 
and the virtue of carrion birds,

the white lining of pigs' stomachs?
Every story has at least one other

way of telling; and every failure
could be a martyr and a hero 

in someone else's life. For such
is the way we're made: a wavery core

which makes it easy to be convinced 
of the truth of a situation; and then 

we wake riddled through and through
with many kinds of doubt. Which is why

I'm in awe of those saints depicted 
in statuary and paintings: the ones 

who stood their ground despite holding 
the most unpopular opinion, and met 

their end by having their heads swiftly
severed from their bodies with a sword

or axe. Especially marvelous is how these
cephalophores calmly picked up their heads

and cradled them in their arms, as if they'd 
just picked up a nice pumpkin from the field 

and wanted to take it home. There's Aphrodisius 
who continued walking to the chapel while 

his dumbfounded camel looked on. San 
Ginés de la Jara hurled it into the Rhône 

like a bowling ball. After his head fell 
to the ground, witnesses said Nicasius 

of Rome continued mouthing a psalm: "Revive 
me, Lord, with your words." He'd just reached 

the part that spoke of the soul's connection 
to dust: if you looked close you might catch

an occasional gleam: fragments among 
stones, perhaps from some chipped halo.



 

In response to Via Negativa: Slug test.

He goes to every Lost and Found desk
in the building the day he finds 

his car keys missing, and can hardly 
believe how many fobs and key rings 

and lanyards there are, like toys 
someone forgot to take in from 

the sandbox. But his is not among them. 
He will go back every day for a week, 

maybe two, to check on whether someone 
has turned it in; after which it will 

cease to matter as much anymore. With every 
passing day, it seems the column on one side 

marking losses grows longer than the column
on the other side listing possessions. A parade 

of eyeglasses and eyeglass cases, half 
a country of missing socks. The buckles 

and buttons from beloved shirts, the cat 
running into the street as soon as no one 

is looking. The children leave, one after 
the other. Years later, there is only the lake, 

the reflection of mountains in them. Then even 
the mountains disappear, or he from them.   

 
 

What is it that floods the silence
before sound, preceding the body
before it walks into a room? 

It is a pail that lifts from the well 
toward the one that pulls, hand over 
hand, on the rope; it is a thirst 

for something cold and sweet. But what 
does the throat even know of itself and its 
thirst before the first blind sip of water? 

What is the object of longing, that 
for which we feel we'd give up all, or perish? 
The empty bowl and the spoon that scrapes 

along its bottom, the mailbox yawning in 
the sun. When tree-trimmers arrive, a squirrel 
lopes across the street in a frenzy, carrying 

a furry bundle in her mouth. When evening comes, 
sometimes it is an exhalation and you didn't 
realize how long you were holding it in.

Somewhere in a city filled 
with spires, in a cathedral left 
of the square, is a smaller chapel 
with the statue of a wild boar 
and a painting of the Virgin with seven 
lances stuck in her heart. This must be
extremely painful, and yet she looks up
toward the ceiling, or the sky, or heaven
as though her sorrows have lifted her 
to a weirdly tranquil space beyond everyday
understanding. And somewhere in another city 
is a very old street which bears the name 
of suffering, because a bishop was 
decapitated there on the way to becoming 
a saint. A famous writer used it 
as the setting for a story about a lost 
necklace: his two characters coming home 
from a ball scour every inch of the street 
in the cold pall of morning, then 
surrender to a life of penury— and they 
must bear it, for is there any other recourse? 
Which only goes to show how the saintly are not 
so different after all from the rest of us 
merely trying to make it from day to day: 
they love their children so much
though they know their hearts will be 
irremediably broken. They go into the streets, 
speaking of what they believe. They give in 
to a bit of desire, wanting to feel, even 
for a few hours, the gleam of something 
extraordinary around their necks.