Author: Luisa A. Igloria

All of us travel here 
in the same way, in our
own time.

The body, breaking 
through the surface,
learns that such entry 
is never clean. 

What opens may not ever
return to its former shape.
At the moment it happens,
it's aided by gravity.

And the mind, too, moves
downward toward what 
palpably hurts. 

After, there is 
the loneliness of having 
been the doorway. You are
the portal through which more 
than language has passed.

You can't take anything
back. You can call it 
devotion or you can 
call it regret. 

But it isn't by accident
that the areola's soft 
bluish flesh connects 
magnetically 

to that ocean in whose depths 
one could drown, cresting
the waves of pleasure. 

Counting, like in the tales
where girls are given impossible
tasks to numb their fingers and hearts— 
Separate grain from pebbles by nightfall, 
sew seven shirts without speaking a word 
for seven years. Silence itself, part 
of the spell: a clause in a contract 
you don't even remember having signed 
in blood or ink. Only in those stories
are there helpers: talking mice, 
birds, ants, meaning belief 
in the kindness of nature which 
somehow bends toward you because 
it intuits an injustice. But I want 
to know how the curse can be broken, 
how the loop of bad luck can be severed 
once and for all, not just reversed. 
I want to drop this needle and 
burn this loom, see my loves 
emerge out of the forest or 
soften from stone back into flesh. 
Let whatever I may have mislaid 
be suddenly found in the corner 
of a coat pocket, the toe of a shoe.  

Feeling slightly out of alignment with
the world, I stop at the grocery store 
looking for something to nudge me back 
onto the road of purpose I drive each 
day— home to work, work to home. I think 
of getting flowers, but would that be  
admitting something I can't say aloud? 
In there, the sunflowers are smaller 
than I remember: heads disheveled 
under LED lights, faces turned nowhere 
in particular. Have they, too, forgotten 
how to follow the sun? There's not one 
particular cause for blame— not the hike 
in oil prices nor the increasingly infertile 
soil from climate change, not the store 
and the unpredictability of supply and demand. 
Once, the hills of my childhood were dotted 
with the same yellow blooms. Their brightness 
reflected a light I never questioned, as if 
it would always be there, forgiving me 
everything before I even thought to say
what for. I try to think of that light again 
here, and in the end I leave the flowers 
with their price tags exactly where they are. 
I walk back into my day, hands empty 
of everything but this honesty.   

I would too, if I were lonely
and if I were a god. I'd invent

a snack like this: Lonely God
Potato Twists, red and yellow 

and foil-wrapped among the shrimp 
chips and Boy Bawang in the Asian 

grocery. Also, what's not to love
about a plot twist after years of yawn 

and meh? Remember Chubby 
Checker in the '60s, who hit 

number one on the Billboard Hot 
100 not once but twice? Suddenly 

everyone was dancing in place, 
swiveling their hips, having 

a good time: Come on baby... and go
like this. But in 1962, in Buffalo, 

New York, a bishop saw only lewdness 
in these gyrations and banned them— 

which only made the Twist more popular. 
Joy doesn't need permission. It catches on

like contagion. Any lonely god would want 
to feel loosed from the world's grip 

sometimes. As for the chips, of course 
I buy them. I tear the packet open with 

my hands— each salty crunch loud as 
the sound of a rule breaking somewhere.
 

wills and directives— if this,  

then that. If we're lucky, or
not. Who benefits from certain

actions? Who gains from my love 
of bathing in sunlight, loses

from my habit of pulling up weeds 
with bare hands? I know the cost

of not putting things in order. 
I also know also how impossible 

it is to itemize assets vs. debts,
time spent vs. time held against

future use. Finally, I'm learning
to sort the mail as soon as it

comes, to believe in dreams 
as dreams instead of prophecy—

one springs from the mind
of what can be, and the other

from the mind of what seems
to know what can't be known.   

We go back to the doctor whose name
means either target or stain. Back to 
the room with crinkly paper on the exam 
table, posters on the walls illustrating 
roads connecting the nose to the throat 
and the ear. We are here for results, 
which means consequence or outcome,
or the score after a test. The doctor
says a few new spots, as if he might 
be talking about cafés in town 
or tickets to a sold-out concert.
Small, he says like an afterthought;
just something to watch. But already 
the muscle that anticipates grief 
has awakened again in me. We walk
to the parking garage. Magnolias 
are pinking their branches. Cars honk. 
A guy walks across the street, eyes glued 
to a phone in his hands, oblivious. Almost 
evening but the light is still impossibly 
bright, so we decide to stop for ice  
cream. When we lie down at night, I listen 
to your breathing, tell myself the future 
isn't arriving yet, or all at once.

except in all the ways my being
an immigrant are different 
from all the ways you experience 
your being an immigrant 
differently from me.

And yet we are capable 
of the same joy, the same
grieving, the same terrible
capacity to break and be
broken open, to choose rice 
over bread, both salt and sugar, 
soft instead of hard.

Language isn't 
the only gate you think
leads to the garden. 

Try to enter the mind 
of the one whose work 
you're translating. 

It might be easier to bribe
the watchman, but where 
is the charm in that?

Before it existed as riddle, 
the poem beat against stones 
at the foot of the cliff.

Or it hung among particles 
caught in the lighthouse beams 
sweeping across the channel.  

The sound of air passing
through the mouth is a variant
of a form that can't be seen. 

The chest rises and falls. The water 
recedes. Sometimes you can walk so far 
without encountering a ripple.

How strange they look, the toes 
like little knobs of ginger snapped

from the root, or like pulled out 
taffy, cooled mid-stretch. Heels,

meanwhile, thicken with calluses from
walking or running, standing in line. 

From wearing shoes made by those who don't 
seem to have any idea beyond the novel 

design. Surrender your feet to the woman 
at the pedicure place. She'll cluck 

as she lowers them into a water bath, then 
pat each one dry before sanding down things 

with a power tool— like furniture. Furnish, 
from the mid-15th century: to fit out, 

equip, provision (as in a castle, a ship, 
a person). Which is to say, what's used daily, 

over time needs some polish. From another angle, 
they resemble two narrow isthmuses side by side, 

anchoring the mainland of the body to wood floor, 
bathroom tile, sandy beach or garden plot. They turn 

into maps at the accupressurist's, who traces 
and kneads, leans hard into a spot, saying 

Liver, lung, right here! the little intestine, 
blocked. Suddenly the key fits into the lock.

A marvel, as if all this time, what you've 
always wanted to know was just under your heel. 

We write messages, put them in bottles,
cast them into space. We curate what we think 
is the best of us, or the most representative 
of us. Music played by symphonies, the one-
note hum of a sitar, a shimmering copper 
chorus of gongs, the mellow voices of poets. 
Laughter, rain and foghorns; animal calls, 
greetings in 55 languages. Who even knows 
when or whether or not future beings 
will examine our artifacts? By then, 
the oceans will long have forgotten 
our names and continents crumbled 
in the depths like soggy croutons. Still, 
we are in love with the idea that beauty 
will somehow outlast the void, 
that a billion light years from now, 
something of us might survive, even 
if only as a chord in the dust of space.