Author: Luisa A. Igloria

I wonder what it took to stay the terrible
moment of doubt, and so do the gods’ bidding?
Too many instances of sacrifice in mythology,
each a dagger entering history in the guise
of duty. But surely there was doubt? Some
small tremor before the winds of prophecy
named one daughter instead of another,
thrust her neck on a stone altar? Torn
sails mended, boats sailed through pliant
waters as if thresholds were always meant
to be marked with blood. Centuries later,
we are still saying war is the circumstance
that justifies murder. Cities burn, seas turn
their dark into a wine that erases memory.

Cream of Corn with Mashed of Chicken Soup
is what the Menu lists, among other things
like Happy Family and Husband Delight. 
And on the other laminated pages, pictures
of noodles, velvet in many variations of sauce.
A stream of people arrives through the doors,
shaking drops of water from their umbrellas.
On windowpanes facing the street, the red-
green-yellow blur of traffic lights. Think 
of a Hopper, but set in a different country—
where thick porcelain cups and plates 
sit on formica-covered tables and rice
bowls are wreathed with steam. Language
translates imperfectly, but hunger knows
the shape of soup spoons delivering 
the very thing for a night like this. 
 

A building on the corner of Otek 
and Chanum streets used to be 
a Kempetai headquarters, during 
the Japanese occupation. In the '50s, 
it was converted into the Bayanihan 
Hotel, though some of its dark history
lingered in wooden panels and broody 
green paint, like the interior of a forest. 
I was very young when my father picked up 
his niece and her fiance from the bus 
station, and helped them get a room there; 
they had just eloped. This word, explained 
in terms of marriage, choice, and going 
against others' wishes. My father seemed 
pleased that he could help, which told me
what side he was on. Or perhaps, it was
the only way to save face, if a child
was already on the way. We were taught
that history is what has happened— over
and done. The past, a bed you can't  abandon. 
But I've come to learn the past survives in many 
ways, finds new forms to inhabit. Silence carries 
the things we've inherited, then one day tips them out
like diesel leaking from the gas station on the corner. 
Something remains alert inside spaces we thought 
were vacant. Then light climbs the staircases at night,
touches the drapes as though reconsidering a decision.
 

Where do we get the tendency to look for symbols 
when perhaps sometimes the thing is only itself 
and not some larger or more universal meaning?
The blackbird that lights on the topmost branch
of the fig tree may simply be resting and not 
bearing messages from the dead. The flimsy
petals of crepe myrtle that stick to my hair every
time I navigate the short walk from the sidewalk
to the car may only mean it's time to call the city 
for pruning services, and not confetti from the gods.
We find a penny on the edge of the doormat, 
and naturally we want to pick it up for luck. Ants
form a wavering but determined line from the window-
sill to the counter. In a bowl, a pear is starting to bruise
softly in its bronze-colored jacket, and I recall
the dark spot on my father's left hand. Who called 
to what, and who answered? Everywhere I walk,
it seems there's a thread I can pull on, attached 
to a picture hiding in plain sight. I know I want
to be addressed, to feel some kind of touch
which I might find reassuring. But the dark, 
glossy sheen of bird feathers, the speckled 
rind on fruit and the sugar beginning to foam
out of its pores can be presence enough. Not 
certainty, just the briefest mark of grounding.

At a lunch gathering, two friends tell
of how their parents knew each other 
from having played tennis doubles. 
They knew each other's parents back 
then, when they were children in 
ruffled socks and patent leather shoes. 
But as with most everything, that part 
of their lives veered off in other directions. 
Then one day, decades later, these two 
(now past middle age, walking the same 
college hallways), saw the faded sports 
logo on a tote or a sweatshirt and froze 
in the instant of recall: the thwack of balls 
bouncing on synthetic turf, sycamore trees 
at the edge of the courts, screams of children 
at a nearby park. We call it chance, but what if 
coincidence is merely the long garment of time 
revealing a secret pocket? What if a ball lobbed 
one long morning ago into the air has been traveling
toward this moment, before falling into the open
hand of recognition? In the Poetics, Aristotle said 
a likely impossibility is preferable to an unlikely
possibility. We shake our heads but smile.
There's no need to explain the complicated 
patterns made by the shadow of leaves 
as sunlight passes through them: how they
will slant toward the south-facing wall 
at dusk, before dissolving into themselves.

A famous singer's longtime  guitarist 
just released his first solo album. He's in 
his seventies, spent decades inside
someone else's songs, providing 
the opening riffs, the endings. Perhaps 
it's unsurprising that words like end 
or beginning grow soft with time. 
In a radio interview, he talks about
waking up one morning, wanting to open
another door, follow where it leads  Once 
I may have thought that starting over 
meant burning things down, throwing 
other things away, leaving only the bleached 
sheen of floorboards. At the end of this street
that people call a dead end with no outlet, 
the river is just humming to itself. In some 
front yards the grass is freshly trimmed, 
and in others the green is long-haired, 
even defiant. And time itself is a room 
inside of which we continue trying on outfits, 
arrangements, stacking and restacking cups 
and dishes, wiping dust off headboards, shining 
the silver; sorting the trash from recyclables,
vowing not to speak to each other ever again.
Perhaps things that stop or vanish haven't really 
gone into the dark, but into a freedom I'm being asked 
to consider, though I don't understand completely—
Even the hero is told to lash himself to a raft,
surrender to the water and to the fickle gods
who request sacrifice, and then like stars  
release a little light from a great distance. 

- after Larry Levis

Of his boyhood bathed in dust
and vines, a poet wrote: A life like that? 
It seemed to go on forever— Labor in fields 
and orchards, hours in the bland hallways 

of school followed by nights as seasons 
changed from one currency to another.
If I lean hard into the pocket of air 
right by my cheek, I can hear 

the gurgle of frogs beneath the vegetable 
plots, the sharp scouring of wet driveways 
by aunts armed with stiff-bristled brooms. 
I also want to say I was happy then, pulling 

chayote off a trellis covered with tendrils
like old telephone coils, lighting a spiral 
of Elephant katol in its clay dish before 
inhaling its eucalyptus fume. When

did frost scald rows of cabbages,
wilting them leaf to bone? In church,
on Sundays a priest in robes of silk
dipped bayabas branches 

into an urn of water and shook
droplets over our bowed heads.
Sometimes doves flew in from 
the parking lot and hovered

in the vaulted ceiling. Cool
marble of tile underfoot. Votives
that we knew would flicker out
when flame hit the empty pans.

~ after "Paradise Lost," Raqib Shaw


There are things that bring me back 
to myself as soon as I'm in their presence,

though I might not have known that to be true
the minute before— A window layered all in blue

on the lower floor of a gallery, the opening 
lines of a cello that pry something open in me. 

One morning I stood enraptured before a hundred-
foot mural, and a stone seemed to roll away from 

a sealed tomb. The artist had applied brilliant 
automobile enamel paint with fine needle tips 

of syringes and porcupine quills. The many 
avatars of himself crossed landscapes lit

on fire, studded with rhinestones, crowded 
with creatures howling at the moon. Blue 

baboons tore the hearts out of their shredded 
prey like priests presiding over a sacrament. 

Centaurs flung baskets of gold coins into the air.
Hordes of elk and hummingbirds stampeded 

off the cliffs in a shower of springtime blossoms. 
Yes, I see what our world has become, and what we

have become in it. Yes, I know what it means to sob 
when I can't find words for the untranslatable. When

did we stop carrying lanterns for each other?
There goes a picnic basket holding fig jam, rare

cheeses, olives glistening in pools of oil: 
abundance drowning in violent ocean swells. 

And yet there's time to write this story on paper, 
with ink, under a saffron tree. Time to listen to what 

leaves and what arrives. To love, even now, what breaks 
and is beautiful, what's beautiful because it breaks.  
 

 

(first soul)

You spoke these words
into my ear: I cannot talk
anymore. Teaching me,
even as you were dying,
about dried flowers.

* Ilocanos have a four-soul system: kararua (like the soul that only leaves the body after death); karkarma (the soul that can temporarily leave the physical body if it is stolen or if the person is frightened — this soul can be called back to the body); aniwaas (the soul that can leave the body when one is asleep, and visit places familiar to it); and araria (the soul that is liberated after death, though its presence can continue to manifest—to haunt living relatives and loved ones).

(fourth soul; a nonet)

I bow to the blooming squash flower,
to whorls of seaweed on the shore.
The moon’s fingernail wakes me—

I am its wayward child,
a tiny insect
blinded by light,
climbing rungs
streaked with
ash.


* Ilocanos have a four-soul system: kararua (like the soul that only leaves the body after death); karkarma (the soul that can temporarily leave the physical body if it is stolen or if the person is frightened — this soul can be called back to the body); aniwaas (the soul that can leave the body when one is asleep, and visit places familiar to it); and araria (the soul that is liberated after death, though its presence can continue to manifest—to haunt living relatives and loved ones).