Author: Luisa A. Igloria

the idea of endless reinvention. Put on a ruffled
collar and hose in the morning, then at noon 
rip that costume off. By evening, shack up
with yourself in a citadel of your own choosing 
and decide you've had it with public life. The forms
of one's solitude are always works in progress.
Which is why you try. You can only try. Life, as anyone
can confirm, is a noose only as tight or as comfortable 
as you make it. Its other name is obsession. The scientist
walked through the cold streets at night back to the lab.
With the lamps unlit, she saw shelves of gleaming beakers,
particles unearthed from pitchblende. The hems 
of her skirts were lined with them. The pages of her
notebooks. A lifetime of following the trail they made.

the heat. You can always blame the heat. Or
algae in the water. The finger that the crook
may or may not have touched to the surface
of the soup. The low quality of the paint. Or
the adhesive. Or the impatience of the crew
tasked to make everything work just so. It was
the early self-congratulation. Followed by this
cascade of blame. It was the rockets in the sky,
the heat signals they sought, the silence of crickets
in the field.  Every day it was going to be the end. 
Or just another version of the end. The sun went 
to our heads until our heads exploded. It was a pool 
that mirrored nothing but dross. Not even the relief 
of a dagger buried in its poisoned heart.  

the given, the background to our nature. Born/

with all our grief/ already in us, like teeth. But teeth,

when they give you trouble—you go to the dentist.

Sit in the chair, open your mouth, submit to the sickle 

probe and the scaler, the drill and suction device. Grief 

lodges somewhere deeper than the gum, deeper than 

a root canal procedure could numb then clean out 

the damaged interior. The very young new dentist 

is astonished. She says, You have quite a lot of dental work, 

the same way one might say Do you not brush your teeth, 

don't you have insurance? And you wonder if grief and pain 

have somehow been miraculously eradicated while you 

slept. You do—you do the hygiene, the irrigation, even

knowing all this was there before you even started.






~ after Kevin Young, "Underworld (Circle Three),"
Night Watch

a parade of ships, passing yearly through Thimble 
Shoals and the Chesapeake, into the downtown 
harbor. It was the unfurled romance of barques, 
wooden-hulled sloops and schooners— the Gloria, 
Vela,  Esmeralda, Oosterschelde. When and If, Patton’s
dream to sail around the world when the war was over, 
and if he lived through it. A solemn choir of brown 
pelicans watches from the docks, their own six-
foot sails folded. In the 1500s, Magellan's fleet 
took a year and a half to reach the Philippines 
from Spain. Container ships from Shanghai arrive 
at the port terminal in just over a month. The pelican
dives from 60 feet in the air to spear a fish. It tilts
its head a little sideways, then swallows it whole. 

all I ate, in a fever—the world
and its salt cracklings, a world 
of bitter aftertastes washed down 
with weak dispatches about how all 
shall be well. Oh, don't mistake my 
sadness for a hardness of heart. 
On the contrary, I am constantly 
accused of having been too trusting,
too soft rather than steely in resolve.
Thus have I been made to hang my head 
in shame, though I paw at the rocky ground
with my hooves to signify that even then, I 
didn't, don't, give all of myself up. Inside, 
there's a room where I refuse to be pummeled. 

the rough shine of water coursing from the cast-
iron pump upon a concrete slab. It was the flapping
of loose shingles and the high shriek of a nightjar
from dusk to dawn. A tangle of sweet potato vines 
crept toward your feet as if to say You think 
your grief is original but what do you really know
of how things learn to sweeten in the dark?
As you've always been told, you should learn
not to look directly at the sun. You should 
learn to trust what stands there year after year.
The mountains. The sea. The outcroppings 
of rock on whose ledges birds and mummies
perch, harmoniously. There is change, just not
always visible. There is also the unchanged.

always the messy and nonlinear parts
that confounded. Not the science, nor
the idea of evidence only as a certain 
type of artifact that may be recorded 
and tagged, measured, assigned space 
in a catalog. But one should be able to walk 
into an archive and perceive the lushness 
of that time in the feel of paper, the sudden 
hurt in the curved darkness of tortoiseshell 
combs resting on a vanity. Nothing could have 
prepared me for the tenderness of tattered 
bedclothes, dust in every crevice of wooden 
cookie molds, the faded cursive on the flyleaf
of a missal: My dearest— a message cut in half.

the forms of our diligence, the meek
demeanor, the tongue held in check
that pleased the elders. We held back
our appetites, letting others go first, 
whether that meant the heel of a loaf 
or a last pail of bath water. But it was 
their strange admiration of those unlike 
us—their friends'  fair children who spoke 
impeccable English and were fluent in
French or Italian, and knew how to be 
cheeky in all of them. They traveled. 
They carried themselves with a certain 
élan. It was the impossible, the alluring 
contradiction between home and the world. 
 

the heaviness and certainty of the impending.
Finally I took out the binder and started to enter
information that end of life planners think
will be the most useful to those who’ll have
to put my affairs in order. Let me tell you,
these things are not a breeze. I filled in perhaps
two pages. I haven’t reached the part where,
seeing the light, Dante might exclaim
that within its depths, he sees Bound by love
into a single volume, Pages that lie scattered
through the universe. OK Dante, I’m trying
to get it together. The wood is also dark
tonight, a storm bearing down, the sea
a typewriter carriage endlessly recording.

early morning, the red shutters
not yet flung open, everyone else 
in Vitebsk still asleep (except for someone 
relieving himself by the fence). A goat grazes
in the yard between the stable and the house.
Mist and fog cloak everything with the quiet 
of not-moving. If there's any ripening and harvest
in orchards and fields, this isn't in the picture.  
Neither is the war looming over Europe 
and the rest of the world.  But you and your wife 
rise into the powdery sky like something of joy 
that's escaped containment.  Like the landscape 
soon folding inward into cubes shows you a dimension 
it wants you to remember above everything else. 

~ after Marc Chagall