Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Centuries ago, it was believed
that something could be made holy

by singeing it with fire, letting 
its blood drip into a cup to offer

on an altar with prayers and song.
A blessing once meant a marking,

the hand touched to the wound 
to gentle its turn toward grace. 

Under the well which gives water, 
tunnels deep in the earth snake 

through thorny bramble and rock, 
seeking the root of things. Without 

having known what it’s like to fumble 
through darkness, would the pearl-

light of morning feel less of an 
astonishment? Bodies that bore 

a hundred hurts, that carved of 
themselves an offering. A warbler 

balances on the tip of a branch, 
its weight barely enough to break it. 

From light to light, breath seeks a path
to brilliance unencumbered. What we endure 
proves more than survival. To be spared— 
really, what are the chances? No one’s anointed. 
Tempered in leaves and ash, brine yields a coarse 
and smoky salt. Time has worked this way too 
on the planes of your face. From darkness 
hammered on the anvils of the past, how 
you remake the world each time determines
how you rise. Your first home's receded into 
the archive, so you tend to think any venture
could be a homing. You choose to go out again 
into the wide world, believing your life 
is both the oldest and the newest song.

*

What you worked hard for, you know  
you’ve earned. First author, clear byline.

Your name spelled correctly— how hard
could it be? It seems more than a lifetime, 

this work of standing up for your due. 
And yet you haven’t lost excitement for

things you still hope to do. Teach and write, 
make books, read books, exchange ideas to find 

elusive delight; discover how lives shaped 
in heaviness and endurance might breathe. 

Shed scales close as armor, feel the blade joy
can touch to your chest where it finds a place of

softness. Remember sweetness after years 
of strain, how skies widen from light to light.

*

Some things are simple, like kindness.
Like looking at instead of looking away,
standing as witness; finding ways to return 
some grace in the harshness of the world. 
You try to remind yourself you are not only
the things (you imagine) you lack. How else
could you honor the roster of unnamed
acts that made it possible for you to hold
your place in this moment?  Yet you know
there are things you still need to deflect,
rephrase, insist on. Remember you 
can rewrite the narrative, insist on your
truth. Walk into the room because it’s
true— you worked hard, you own it too. 

*

Remnant energies, sheltered in stone
through seasons of debt and sorrow.

War and rebuilding, then war again. 
Fortresses chiseled with towers 

from which sentries could witness how
wind turned the waters’ brined pages.

Repeat as cities hum into being 
and warehouses fill with the resin 

of trees. War today, war tomorrow.
What is the difference between 

revolution and insurrection? History
might not want you to remember survival

shouldn’t mean turning into stone, that
the simple energy of kindness exists.

*

Fragile spark, flame you cup to keep
from sputtering. Mind it doesn’t die out,  
this fire handed down from one to another 
down the centuries. An edict, a wish, a talisman.
A dream, messages inked on your bones by forebears 
who knew to find the hinge where the tip of a spear 
could find its target. Bloody skirmish on the shore
(it wouldn’t be the last),  after a portal opened 
and three-masted ships with broadsides and
falconets brought their hunger from across 
the ocean. Bite of peppercorn and cardamom,
burnish of clove and cassia bark. The letter 
from the ancestors is brief: Don’t let the heat 
turn remnant. Shelter its energy in stone.

*

Living is the oldest war in the world. Out walking,
and twilight leans in. Streetlights blink as if everything

needs to grow accustomed to the dark. Hands
in your pockets against the cold— when did you  

learn to curl them close into themselves, in secret? 
People gather in lit-up spaces filled with song 

and noise. You push the door open, slide
into a seat. Here too, while joining in,

you’ve learned to rearrange those parts of yourself 
at once rawer and softer, the ones you learned to

shelter from even joy.  While glad for welcome, you
never entirely lift  your hand from the dial, always 

taking measure. The list of the wind, any draft 
that could snuff out the fragile spark you carry.

*

You walk into this life each morning
as if it was the first day over again and you,
one of the new arrivals to this world. Brush
your teeth, straighten your collar in the mirror,
practice the length or shortness of vowels
your tongue still trips over sometimes. Quickly 
self-correct in front of a roomful of eyes. It’s still 
winter but bodies with skin the same color as yours 
are yanked into the streets in their underwear or 
dragged through the broken windows of their cars. 
Long a, short a. Not pliss, please. Inhale, exhale.
A custom is a habit. A customs is an inspection.
You breathe the indifferent air, you know you must.
Keep walking. Living is the oldest war in the world.

*

High up on my left thigh, a brown mole,
its tint muted by time. I used to wonder
if this could be listed as one of my
"identifying features"— what's meant 
when describing the shape of your nose,
how your brows arch or careen to the left 
while the other lies inert as a tent 
that could never be raised. Most 
of the time I forget it's even there. 
Not something to register, stepping out 
of the shower and toweling off. My mother 
had moles across her back— a page out of 
connect-the-dots coloring books like the ones
she bought so I could amuse myself and never
be bored. Connect the dots, from one to ten 
to fifty to almost a hundred, the age she 
would have been had she not passed away 
at ninety. After I gave birth to my first
child, she handed me a warmed-up cup
of coconut oil to stroke across my
belly. For the stretch marks, she said.
For helping speed up the skin's snapping
back to the state it was before it
was marked by life, if I was lucky. 

The bottom drawer holding sweaters and 
scarves: you can't make it stick, except 
with a wad of cardboard. The refrigerator 
leans slightly to the right, resting against 
a wooden block you inserted between its shoulder 
and the wall. The jagged line across the counter 
panels, invisible until you look under the top: 
like the view of a crooked gap in the teeth 
of someone when they finally smile with their 
whole mouth. There's so much inventory you 
can list of the mismatched, the propped-
up, the almost falling down. Your dream,
when you dreamed of a house, was of floors
that flowed smooth as the afternoon light
falling on them through windows. Rooms
you could almost hear breathing, before
the years filled them with clothes and 
furniture, small appliances that chimed  
or sang the start of the day or the end  
of a washing cycle. You want to apologize
to keys and quilts, bottles of cleaner 
under the sink, the orange in the fruit
bowl and the banana that turned mushy— 
at least explain how all you wanted was 
an orderly life, the magic of simplicity
and alignment. But they remind you again
that this is what it is. And if you are
tender to yourself, you'll hear and 
maybe even smell the rain falling on 
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled 
map of this life which shows you there 
are still wildnesses left unexplored.