Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Watch your step, you’re told, one step ahead 
of falling or breaking. Or take care, which can house 
real care and also, unsurprisingly these days, a threat. 
A doublespeak, an always-guessing what a moment 
might really mean. How to tell an innocence from
an evil, or when someone who says I mean it really 
means it? In the movie you watched, a security guard 
makes a lewd remark to the tee-girl. The golf depot 
manager makes a pass at a female caddy then huffs 
about how no one can make or take a joke anymore. 
Someone’s always telling you to lighten up and not be 
so serious. You still don’t know how the plot resolved, 
or if it did—did she swing the golf club at his head? Did she 
think she was trying to save someone, or did she drown?

Something inside you tremors when the surface
is touched by feeling. That thing about the heart
worn on a sleeve—a guilelessness perceived by others,
which means feeling rises—a flush, a stutter, or tears—
more rapidly than any thought could clothe it first 
in something not so naked. Tonight it’s all you can do
to keep from dissolving—the sight of people putting 
their I Voted stickers on lampposts near where Alex
and Renee were murdered, the news of blue wins in near 
every state. Someone you love telling you this is the first 
time in years they did not wish, almost every minute, 
to die. On the outside, you’ve learned to appear calm, 
even if your heart's racing. You're always lurching one 
step ahead to keep something from falling, breaking.

Send away what no longer serves, with proper ceremony.
You’ve done this before, but perhaps incorrectly, thinking
that unburdening’s a simple thing. How hard could it be,
right? To set down the girl you were, awkward and green,
heart-sore, astounded at how much could be asked of a body
that gave itself to another body to afterward beget other 
bodies. This isn’t to say it was only just about bodies.
But you still can’t get over the astonishment of stumbling,
groggy, from the hospital bed that first time, and pushing 
the IV pole with you to the bathroom. When a sheet
of coagulated blood slipped out of you and to the floor,
you bent down and cradled the whole, slippery thing 
in your hands, flushed it down the toilet. Reddened palms,
fingers, touched something that issued from inside of you.

The way wends down these southern streets,
where houses with their wraparound porches
stand next to each other, though there might not  
be any movement behind the curtains. It’s a rare
sight these days: a pair of old-timers on rocking 
chairs taking the air, trading notes on the weather 
or whose child finally finished school or if we are in
for another wet winter. Once, I followed myself
to the shore—a windy night, sky of blackest blue
—and looked east. At least, that’s what I thought
I was supposed to do: bring this simmering
heartsickness to this place at the edge of water,
fold and crease it into shape. Send it away
with proper ceremony. Wish it well.


* – “Peripatetic”

They're calling them in
                  State after state for the win
                                        Majority wins

White noise is the crackly noise a radio makes
when you can't quite find the station you want.
It thrums at a lower frequency than pink noise, 
an example of which might be light to medium
rainfall. I turn on a sound machine shaped 
like a wooden egg and click through crickets,
single raindrops, birds cawing through the forest
cover. Maybe there are frogs in there somewhere,
a chorus of coquís singing all night without need for 
a conductor. I've come to like the setting turned
to ocean sounds—the whoosh of water as if just 
under my window, the surf coming in and out. 
I can pretend I could walk down to the shore 
in the moonlight, fall asleep on beach, wonder why
my sheets are flecked with sand in the morning.

 

"Roughly 40,000 metric tons (about 44,000 U.S. tons) of 
cosmic dust and meteoroid material enter Earth’s 
atmosphere every year." ~ World Atlas

~ and after Katrina Bello 

Nearly twice the Statue of Liberty

400 times heavier than a blue whale
which can eat only small fry like krill
and 15,000 times heavier than a blue 
whale's tongue  

60,000 times heavier than a cow, including
the Holstein cow that William Howard Taft
named Pauline Wayne and kept on the White
House grounds

Back to the blue whale— 200,000 times
heavier than its heart

700 million times heavier than a single
tennis ball, the kind that Alex Eala lobs across 
the net or the spare she keeps in her hip pocket

5,500 billion times heavier than the human eye
which cannot on its own see the cosmic dust
in the aftermath of asteroids and comets colliding
in space

That outer space vs. this inner space, large scale
vs. small scale  

A hand smearing graphite powder and sand, soft
pastels and bark, touching a universe into being

Teachers and students come out of the building after the last
late night class. They’re spooked by a cop skulking around the front
doors, cellphone in hand.

In the morning, all the memorials have been taken down: the notes
of care, the posters and open letters of outrage at the university.

Chalk messages power-washed away.

The eight faded flowers duct-taped on the brick entryway—one for each
floor a student fell to his death a week before.

In my office on the fourth floor, once, in a conference—

Mid-sentence, my student looked suddenly at the window
from where he sat in a cheerful yellow director’s chair.

What? I said. A hawk, he said. I thought I saw a hawk.

At best, we get a flash. A signal from the optic nerve to the brain.

Recognition of the image in as little as thirteen milliseconds—
before the eyes even have time to blink.

"If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?"
                                                                                                                                                    ~ Emily Berry                                                                                                                                                                                                                 


I keep receipts from trips to the Asian market, because they list
what I've craved like a poem. Bitter melon, mustard greens, beef 
shank with marrow bone. Freckled pear and kabocha, sweet
tocino patties, head-on shrimp. Jacobina crackers like miniature 
squares of clay: two could shingle your tongue. At home, I pour 
short-grain rice into a clear plastic storage box. I pour slowly, 
to invoke the sound of rain. A bottle of wild lime juice goes into
the fridge; the seal remains unbroken, but I can almost feel
the pucker and how my eyes squint as if from too much sun.
When we come indoors one afternoon, the power is out.
The vegetables would be fine, but I worry that the tray of fish 
we bought would go bad. The power comes back in two hours. 
Days later, news reports say a raccoon  made contact with
electric wires at the substation. I wonder what it saw, 
what it thought, when the life went out of him. 

You were taught to grind herbs in a mortar, 
steep comfrey for tea,  divine the clouds 
that form at the bottom of a cup. What 
ailed you was not always from virus or 
contagion, but could be a message 
from the beyond, or demons, or ghosts. 
Death can mark every door with soot
from a torch, let loose a plague of insects
from the sky. No coin can appease it,
but perhaps an amulet pinned to your
undershirt creates some kind of force
field. Still, the body is a hard book to read,
immersive text swirling with dull humors. 
Bile, thickened blood, choleric swarm  
loosed in the bladder. On a good day,
its scars quiet, the skin not bluing. Bones
clothed in ripples, not drenched in hurt.