Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The platypus is a mammal that is a monotreme—
a mammal that gives birth to offspring by laying

eggs. Like other mammals, it produces milk; but 
unlike all other mammals, it has no breasts, no 

outflaring areolae, no nipples. Instead, its milk oozes 
out of glands, condensing in runnels on skin—

Imagine your newborn child licking the surface 
of your body through the day for sustenance: 

its rough little sandpaper tongue, its hunger a whole 
sheet of paper eager for constant priming. When I 

went back to work or had to travel, I used to pump 
my milk into bottles for freezing, because my daughters 

refused any kind of formula. In the soft fluorescent 
glow of the night light, they'd spit out the mix, cry

piteously in their footed pajamas as if to say they'd rather 
starve than drink any poor substitute for the milk I made. 

Recently, I learned the name that's given smaller, 
more familiar groups of stars is asterism—summer 
triangle, teapot, small and large dipper, belt. Is the world 
still capable of beginning in wonder, which is both 
the dazzle of not knowing what hit youand the second-
guessing of everything you think you knew? Each child 
I bore  was that kind of wonder, arriving in their own 
form of spectacular—fast, eyes bright and open; wet 
with the effort to push into this new world; and then 
the learning to navigate their own ungainly craft, bobbing 
in these choppy waters. I wanted to pluck an arrangement 
of stars to fashion into an amulet for each of them. Even now 
I wish for these things—table with four steady legs, hearth-
stone; strike anywhere matches, vocables chiming 
through the mouth and lighting the way home.
 

I used to think grenades were held together by safety pins, though
their pins looked nothing like the safety pins we kept in a narrow
plastic case in the drawer beneath the linen closet, where towels
and sheets smelled of must and mothballs. There is a certain
kind of snail that is a delicacy in towns further north—nothing
like the French escargot, drowned in butter and garlic and wine.
The snails we boiled in plain salted water and ate, when they
were sold in the market, had shiny, blueblack shells spiraling 
into a faint orange smudge in the center. Each had a little trap 
door on one end, shut close but not close enough that you
couldn't pry it open with a fingernail. But how to extract 
the meat of the body, burrowed deep into its heated cave?
My mother and her mother before her used safety pins,
brandishing them delicately like the finest dessert spoons
in the world. Their little silver tips slid in just far enough
to snag one end of muscle, pull it close to where the mouth
could suck the whole morsel out. Safety is a body with 
a place to hide in. It is so safe, like a buried secret. Safety
is the ocean depths or the belly of a ship.

You cling to it until
it deposits you in the mouth
of an alien shore.

At least a step ahead, or two: forward waltz,
blundering with care through abysmally 

constricted passages, the whole complex
design of our mortal lives here below.

Every Eden you knew was mere leitmotiv,
flawed by your wanting. Heat rose from the bayou,

grass receded as the earth cracked. Imagine what
heartland remains after all turns aqueous,

impossible to return to unscathed. Every river
joining the large, vascular whole, every bulwark

kneeling in mud. Once, you knew sweetsop, 
loquat, starfruit and where they grew; the indigo

moons of berries, cells blurring into lumen.
Now you note where chainsaws bit into velum,

oil seeped into bodies to make them weep. Will
pearls weep again into the heart of a mollusk,

quiver iridescent in the depths? A knife shaped like a J
releases the lip from its lock—reverse origami. 

Silence pleats mountains and valleys, where feverish
tectonics many times leveled and wrung, 

undoing what you knew of built histories. Grief
verges on every stone in the quarry, every visible

weave in the lattice. Wilderness was once world
extracted of seemingly every remaining oneiric.

Yet you harbor hope for some underlayer, some crumb
zested with traces not only of omega but also of alpha.. 

In our final year of high school, my friends and I
were studying at home for a test on the works 

of the national hero, including the very last poem 
he wrote before he was marched out of his cell and into 

the field where he would be shot by firing squad at sunrise.  
Between mouthfuls of chips and swigs of soda, we tried 

to recite the poem in stumbling Spanish— Mi Ultimo Adios. 
The story is that his sisters found it, soot-covered, in an  alcohol 

lamp. As we prepared to leave for school, my friends waved 
their thanks and goodbye to my mother, busy at her sewing 

machine. My Last Farewell, I intoned dramatically, 
swinging the door open. My mother's head snapped up 

and she shrieked,  Don't say that, don't ever say that again,
as if I'd turned into a frightening angel of prophecy.

This is a dream: I reach up a hand to the left 
side of my neck and feel a body burrowing there—

leech I extract with my fingers. Since it is a dream,
I don't recoil from the soft squishiness of this body

that wants something from me so badly, it clings 
with its whole mouth. 

                                                 This is not a dream: 
I could give blood, but my liver harbors 

a disease that has taken over my whole 
network of distribution. 

                                                       Back in the dream, I pull
but something is left behind, tenacious as desire. 

I barely feel it, since I can't remember when it first
found me, and somehow found me hospitable.

What is the name of those little bugs
whose backs are stencilled with 
a Mondrian-like design? —squares 
within squares in a grid of black and 
green, spots of red in between.
They like to linger on the siding
around the mailbox and the lamp,
meticulous as pendants or cufflinks.
Some days, the humdrum walls
look curated, like in museums.
So much amassed inventory, 
not all tagged and labeled; 
miniature pans of color that look as if
they'd bloom with the merest touch.

At the beginning of time, all creatures of the deep 
were summoned to a meeting. And all came, except 

for one who claimed it did not have enough bones
in its body that would allow it to cover the great 

distance; and so all the other fish gifted it one bone
from their own bodies. When I feel I have too much, 

sometimes I remember this story about bangus:
milkfish, nawa, ikan bandung, chanos chanos— 

and how its body came to be a minefield of shafts. 
Its scientific name derives from the Greek χάνος 

which means mouth (though its mouth is small
and toothless). This is a story I was told in childhood, 

often as I nearly choked on thread-thin clumps hiding 
within mouthfuls of its tender flesh. There's a whole 

museum dedicated to bangus in a city in Taiwan, 
where schools of sculpted, gleaming milkfish float

above the staircase, held by fishing lines. Then 
as now, I want to know why it didn't or couldn't 

give back what was clearly too much; and what it learned, 
slicing through the waters with its own arsenal of barbs.

                                     ~ after Agha Shahid Ali


The tongues of bells in church towers, the tongues
of leathered moss on stone—my history as Ilocano.

On weekends, we read borrowed komiks on porch 
steps: graphic novels in vernacular, stories in Ilocano.

Liwayway means dawn, and so does bannawag:
first flush streaked like mango curry— An Ilocano

might see instead the sweetness of karabasa, pale ribbons
the color of new rice; dried, salted alchemies in Ilocano.

Call the hilot to oil a twisted ankle, beseech the baglan
to mediate with ancestor gods. Supplicatory, in Ilocano.

I'm still here. I'm always praying under my breath, though you
don't see. But I can't prophesy the future, intuitively or in Ilocano.

Back in the day a statue of Maria was carried from house to house.
Novenas for all the heart's hard causes, intoned in English and Ilocano.

as in purposeful, deliberate. With foreknowledge, rather than
by accident. In Metaphysics, however, pertaining to the capacity 

of the mind to refer to an existent or non-existent object. In other 
words, what one means to do doesn't necessarily yield the intended 

outcome. In which case, the mind might be said to produce a series 
of beautiful mirages: well-meaning, even ideally proportioned; 

the very thing that would have satisfied, if the outcome had equated 
to whatever wish set it in motion. Prometheus, whose name means 

foresight, stole one flint of fire for humankind from the gods and hid it 
in the hollow of a fennel stalk. Didn't the gods mean to bind him to 

a granite cliff and make the vultures feed on his liver as he watched? 
We're told his ravished body healed each day, only to be ready for 

the next assault. This too is intention—the punishments designed 
to be more intricate, more excruciatingly terrible than the crime.