Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The clinic we go to was started 
decades ago by two doctors who recently 
passed away. But their children continue 
to run it, and most of the staff are 
Filipino. One of the nurses always 
recognizes my voice when I call. One 
asks for my opinion about schools when 
her son is applying for college. And another 
always begins to hum under her breath as soon 
as she rests her fingers on my wrists to take 
my pulse. The lab technician is so swift
and skilled: she knows exactly where 
to stick the needle for a blood draw.
The humming nurse comes back in with 
a paper robe. I start to undress when she 
leaves the room, but I can still hear some 
of the notes she repeats, drifting up 
and down and up and down the valley 
of some old tenderness or memory. 
  
 

To signal the start of the feast, 
the matriarch moves to the head of the table 
and hacks at the neck of the roasted pig
with the edge of her best porcelain plate. 
Why this is customary, no one remembers now. 
Like a priestess she continues down its glistening, 
caramel-colored back and the hot hiss released 
from beneath every square is a chorus of crisp
volcanoes. A child watches for anyone who might
choke on a bolus of cartilage so she can part 
their tresses for release. We are here 
with our long-held hungers, our dying 
for a taste. We go home with oily newspaper 
parcels, the ink of what has happened in the world
pooling into each morsel. Dizzy with pleasure,
we cannot tell when our mouths become raw,
and wake with the sensation of stampeding
beasts, released from the cage of our bodies. 

Little fruit flies waft through the kitchen
though there are only lemons in the fruit
bowl: their thick yellow rinds unscored, 
no actual perforation for tunneling into and 
out of fruit flesh. In the yard, the last 
of summer fruit has been sucked to pulp 
by helmeted beetles. The pits of peaches
and the seeds of bell peppers dry quietly
on squares of paper towel, but nothing 
hovers over them. Can you imagine armies
of insects advancing like a plague, 
carrying off babies and small animals?
But perhaps they will deposit them 
on forest perches or on the sleeves
of mountains, where summer rain and 
fern fronds will raise them until 
it's time for them to rejoin 
a world in need of remaking. 

There are people who can talk 
about their exes and how they've 
remained friends despite separation: 

amicable arrangements to co-parent; 
agreement that, with the admission of 
differences, there should be no need 

to escalate them to the scale of telenovela 
proportions. Amicabilis— a word used in Roman  
law to describe friendly and peacable relations, 

or the offer of relevant advice to a court 
so a ruling might be more favorable. If only 
it were simple to dress hurt in softer clothes,
 
take its hands in yours and convince it to stop 
picking at its scabs or installing more concertina 
wire across fence tops. Beyond the edge, that road

goes nowhere. Far away, a river murmurs old 
arguments to itself, resolving in a cascade before 
vaporing into foam. If only the underside of your 

blasted heart found a way to let some green grow again 
between the cracks, allow the blighted shingles to fall 
away into the quiet that surpasses all understanding. 

The memory of doing is the memory 
       of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
       pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
       direction. I stack them and prepare 
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
       shaped like a smile into holes I've
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
       of the world can seem to soften; 
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
       linen thread. Someone filmed a rare 
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
       itself loose from its shell, 
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
       seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.
       

The wind speaks to trees.
Roads turn to rivers
and park benches drown.
We go about our lives
in this seaside town.

*

In the row of houses
by the university,
all week, a flurry:
sorority girls
strutting for TikToks.

*

They look unbothered
in their cowboy boots
and pink bodysuits.
They all hold their phones
aloft for selfies.

*

The tide was highest
on trash pickup day.
Imagine what floated
into the river—
or what will emerge.

*

We tried to recall
the times we fled town.
For sure, for Isabel.
We can't remember;
there were two others.

*

There's still milk and eggs
on grocery shelves.
This is still early—
the season is just
beginning. Days shorten.

*

Do we have Go Bags?
We talk about it.
Emergency status:
practically every
day, the heart thrashes.

 

 
is the logic of luck that everyone 
insists isn't (though it is) the same as

a message sent by angels. The paper plane 
flies in a dream fueled by fireflies, looking

for shadows of wings beneath the lake's 
glass surface; and when it finds them, 

it folds itself into a bud. We sink into that 
lake many times throughout the day, hiding 

from the heat of the sun or torrents of rain. 
How can we not believe it exists? Spines 

of trees curve toward their reflections
and are rewarded with increase. In this dream,

water is more than a tomb: more than need or
the history of all longings unmet under the moon. 

I was listening to a program on NPR
while I cleaned my office, then coiled a string 
of tiny winking bulbs attached to wire around 

the lamp on my desk. Because it's a hand-
me-down from one of my daughters, the plastic 
battery case is broken. I have to jiggle 

one of them loose to turn the thing off. 
On the radio, a Brazilian neuroscientist 
was talking about experiments that show, 

seemingly, how fish may experience pleasure 
and even seek it out. There are fish engaged 
in relationships of mutualism— "cleaner fish" 

like bluestreak wrasses remove blood-
sucking parasites from other fish, enhancing 
their clients' ability to survive while assuring 

themselves of food. But other fish, 
like the threadfin butterflyfish, come back 
for a cleaning even if they harbor no parasites. 

It's as if they might remember how it felt—
little tongues lighting up the white and
yellow chevrons down their backs. 
  
Meanwhile, the fairy lights flickered.
I could have discarded them, but there's 
something appealing in the idea 

of preserving small things that barely
warm the room, much less the corner. 
Perhaps I'm guilty of falling in love 

with meaning that harbors metaphor, 
in love with the promises language offers
though it might not guarantee their truth.

There's alwalys someone who asks questions
like What's your favorite dessert or Who 
is your favorite poet or Who was your most
well-behaved child? Once I read a story 
in which two families shared everything—
I mean literally. Not just a household 
but also their children, whose exact
parentage supposedly could not be known
or that they didn't care to know, since it 
was OK with them— Shared beds, shared 
partners, though not toothbrushes. 
The reasoning was love is not like a pie 
you can divide into parts, some larger 
or smaller, goopy with filling or with 
a flakier crust. It's just pie all the way 
through. Can you love what you don't know 
or what's yet to come as much as you 
can love what's been thrust into your hands? 
The implication might have to do with choice 
or some notion of relativity. Or it might be 
that you can't have a forest without trees; 
you can't say I love only this part of you, and 
only under certain conditions on certain days. 

A poet has assigned one letter of the alphabet
to each of 26 nucleotide triplets that form
the basic units of genetic code. ~ ZME Science




Seed the idea of a world 
in a cell— 
            Its blazons and beehives, 
its cascade of crystals, mangroves 
and mycelial threads. 
                      Not the summary 
of an event but the eidos of it. Imagine 
a generation of cranes 
                       rising from a plain 
after they have been forgotten; after they've 
become extinct. Don't we want 
                              to lure our dead
loves back from the swamps of oblivion? We
feed language into 
                   the undulating mechanism, 
to see how it might withstand extremity.