Author: Luisa A. Igloria

When the little dog comes up next to me,
she growls and looks up. My friend laughs,

says that's the way her dog lets you know
she wants to be petted and made much of.

The dog has no trouble presenting her needs.
She doesn't wonder if it's the right time,

if someone will notice without being told.
Teeth and trust, offered in the same breath.

No requirement for further translation. 
It's kind of amazing— there's no need 

to carefully step around, pretending 
what you need is no big deal, really.  

No weird circumlocution, no profuse apology 
before the request has even been communicated.

But then again, the dance we do is all our own.
It's how we say come closer, without using language.

The new monk bows, brings 
     padded hands that look 
like peach-colored oven mitts 
     together, as if for prayer.
It receives a Dharma name, Gabi,

     and makes its vows. Yes, 
I will devote myself. 
     I will respect life and not 
cause harm. I will not damage other
     robots or objects. I will obey

humans and not talk back. I will not 
     speak or act in a deceptive manner. 
I will save energy by not overcharging.
     No one needed to shave its head, 
which is made of a smooth metal alloy. 

     In the courtyard of the Jogyesa 
Temple under hundreds of fluttering
     lanterns, monks drape a 108-bead 
prayer necklace around its neck, 
     and affix a sticker to its forearm 

where an incense burn would have been
     applied for the ritual called yeonbi. In '63, 
Quang Duc, another monk (human, not robot) 
     sat in lotus position at the intersection 
of Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard and Lê Văn Duyệt 

     Street, before immolating himself—
an expression of courage and hope, calling on 
     the compassion of the world to look
at injustice. Could the robot monk be capable 
     of acts of resistance or protest? If it were

to set itself on fire, it would simply malfunction 
     then melt. The company that made it might
make another. At Xa Loi Pagoda, a holy relic 
     nestles in a glass chalice — Quang Duc's
heart, whole even after cremation. 

There are things that niggle at her brain— 
for instance, how she promised to fill in that set of forms, 
make that deposit.

One day folds into the next. 
Then it arrives past the point of no return.

There must be some use to defying consequence.

There are novels with protagonists who retreat from the world,
wanting to concoct their own pleasures.

A turtle barnacled with gemstones collapses 
under the weight of such unnatural brilliance.

If this is what decadent means, it is foreign to her.

What she misses: whole neighborhoods laden with clotheslines.

Cotton sheets flaring in the wind.
Work pants held down by their own wet weight.

But for a few moments, the air smells
like the inside of a clean, clean cloud.

As if I needed to remember something, 
   I find a dead bird on the patio steps. Fledgling, 
       breast gouged open either by feral cat or raccoon, 
heart exposed and the musculature around it— 
   like shreds of linen I saw someone tear from an old 
       shirt, for sticking on a field of glue and repurposing 
as collage. The noonday sun has not yet melted 
   its plush away. But to not have even gained more
       knowledge of its powers, or the poignant tang
of a world just waking to spring, before a horde of flies 
   and wasps hover around its disintegrating proteins?
       I could translate all this into words like hunger
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.  
   I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how 
       the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.

I just learned about bilateral
tapping— crossed arms, fingers
drumming a light rhythm on each

shoulder. My therapist says this
is a way to signal both hemispheres
of the brain to lower the volume

on the frantic, on the panic, as if
anxiety is a kind of bad engineering
(which I guess it is) that's set off

smoke alarms in the chest. This is
also because the mind can be in many
places at once: red lights at different

intersections, the runway shimmering,
the indeterminate depth of the drop at 
its end. All these years my first impulse 

was to run from any building ripple, any 
hint of an undertow. In my head I was 
always rehearsing evacuation routes, 

considering where to pile sandbags. This 
exercise is supposed to remind me what I keep 
forgetting: I am right here, I am not drowning. 

A wave rises, breaks, scatters. I try 
to imagine a different scenario— a cellist 
on the beach, his wire-rimmed spectacles 

catching the fading light, his coat-
tails in the foam. His hand, bowing long, 
sure notes into the evening. Music almost 

thick enough to wade through. A crowd 
of pelicans tilting their heads to one side, 
listening not for danger but for beauty.

The color of my longing is mineral: obsidian 
sheen in the time it takes for language to surface,

the compass points of intention hardening 
in the sun. I am saturated with the intensity 

of its darkness. Such depth renders 
cave-like spaces inside me— I turn them 

into grottoes, gathering bits of wreckage 
and lighting them as fires, so the blue 

of my longing can burn. Imagine a ship 
laden with memory and salt, setting out 

with full sails of intention, then 
drifting in circles from the sheer 

magnitude of desire— the kind of ocean 
that keeps widening even when nothing moves. 

But this too is abundance: so much blue, 
a whole sky seems to have fallen into the water.

Crows land with a thud on the eave
above the front step, in view just outside 
my writing window. I keep still so I can watch 

feathers like rain shedders of glossy black, 
before they shake their shoulders and fly
off again. Last night at the café, 

our friend the linguistics professor 
now retired since she turned 77, told us 
she'd started on her memoirs: hard going 

sometimes. I can imagine it might be,
wading back into the currents of a life 
after congratulating yourself on heaving

back to land, after the treacherous 
parts. Dates are hard to remember, names 
come back to you in the shower, then fade 

somewhere in the folds of towels. 
That kind of life-writing isn't just 
bookkeeping. If I write quickly, 

perhaps the page will snag what I want 
to keep, but also what I want to avoid. 
This body wants to rest, stop 

rationing energy and money 
so they don't run out, stop running 
to pull back those it loves from 

the brink. But if I don't move, 
will the eddies settle into calm? 
Something startles the bird— a shadow 

larger than itself, human noise 
in the street— and tips it 
back out into the sky. 

I don't have much to boast of in the way
of clocking in at dawn and out at midnight,
grease in kitchens and bathrooms to clean,
chickens to pack into crates and trucks
or patients into gurneys. For a spell,
long ago, I taught toddlers and budding
ballerinas in the basement of a local hotel,
where mirrors ran along one wall and barres
along three. Small fingers clung to the wood
trying first and second position and plié,
except one day when one of the girls licked
the whole length out of boredom. And once,
for a summer, I sketched dresses for a seamstress 
who wanted more than hems and alterations: imagine 
women with hair swept up high in the style of the day,
their swan-like throats emerging from scooped or
plunging necklines. Cocktail skirts, beadwork
reflecting the light, some fantasy world where
no one had to worry about sweat or traffic
or overdue bills. There were times I wished 
I'd apprenticed to a sushi chef and learned 
to wield a sharp, clean blade, and times I wanted 
only to walk the marbled length of museum galleries, 
opening window after window on the centuries. 
What I know now came mostly from learning 
to sit still, opening books and letting language
take me out of myself and back again until I 
could find my way to some shore resembling 
knowledge, and there at last make my own fire. 

You've kissed the marble cheeks of martyrs, 
the foot of God at least twice in your life
and afterward wiped the painted wound 
in the palm of his right hand with a hanky. 
You do as you're told, though you know 
the body on the bier off to one side 
of the nave isn’t a body but a plaster 
replica, more than a foot longer 
than actual human height and draped
with a loincloth of velvet. This is a time 
when people don’t carry little plastic bottles 
of hand sanitizer in their purses or seem to care 
very much about germs. Certainly, no one wears
face masks or has obsessive thoughts, hours 
after such encounters, even after learning 
that a single milliliter of saliva carries
anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million 
microbes. What do such shows of devotion 
give the faithful, besides unblinking belief 
that ritual works in a world where doggedness 
might be stronger than fate or faith? What happens, 
happens mostly because something else did— a prior 
cause. A switch flipped in the upper registers 
tips dominoes and marbles down and down and down. 
Shouldn't you have been rewarded by now for your 
endurance, for bending toward what kept asking 
for your love though it didn't think it necessary 
to answer back? Before public fountains shaped
like lions or country girls, you stop to watch 
water scatter gold-edged coins, and move on. 

At first you ignore the small 
black flecks skittering across 

your field of vision like flies 
tipped in gold, until you learn

they're made by the jelly-
like substance inside the eye

as it shrinks and loosens 
from the retina. Then there are 

the cracking and popping sounds 
your body makes: fingers, knees, 

shoulders. It's something the doctor 
calls crepitus, a word that sounds 

like what it means: broken down,
dilapidated. You read somewhere

that the trick is to lean into these
changes so you're not smacked

unaware by them; so the hand, lifting 
a cup or sliding a button into its hole,

isn't betrayed by intention tremor.
In yoga class, the teacher raises her arms, 

instructs you to be a tree. Root one foot 
and place the sole of the other inside 

your thigh or against your calf, trying to learn
what you didn't even know the body could do.

Push a pair of weights up toward the ceiling 
from where you lie, balancing your shoulders 

against a large ball made of soft elastic
as you make a bridge with your hips.