Author: Luisa A. Igloria

a mango flayed to its seed, a styrofoam box
with mounds of mashed potato. There are
such wonders sometimes on the sidewalk: 
a plastic knife and a melting tub of cream
cheese beside an everything bagel, pristine 
and unmarked by teeth. Amid the thickest
growth of leaves, the insides of ripe figs
spill out of themselves. A ransacking,
a feast, a drama enacted offstage or 
just out of earshot. If I feed you a TV
dinner, will you stay and tell me 
about all the books I haven't read? 
The loneliest food I've ever seen was one 
saltine cracker drowning in a bog of soup.

the midrib of the year, quavering bone 
dividing the rooms into before and after.
Or, history and who knows what comes 
next. The stoics argue that you should never 
allow the future to disturb you, for it will come 
to meet us, regardless. Or you'll run into it 
first, depending  on your willingness to receive 
without nostalgia. Morning light tints the walls
the same color as what leaks into the streets.
You swing your feet over the side of the bed
and they look for slippers, as if they had that 
small, separate autonomy. What does it mean
to live without asking, or expectation? You arms
slide into sleeves, lift a cup of water to your lips.

hotter today in the southeast than it was
in south Texas, according to the news.
The difference between dry heat and humid
heat isn't a matter of philosophical degree.
In 1911, train tracks buckled in the heat 
and roads paved with tar turned syrupy. 
As summer wears on and El Niño takes
hold, heat index charts are mostly fiery
orange. If it's not heat, it'll be lightning 
strikes or tornados. In the great heat
wave of 1936, clouds of blistered grass-
hoppers fell through Midwest skies. A line
in Revelation describes a sea of glass mingled 
with fire, no fleet of cruise ships at the ports.

the luck of the draw. Fortune you can acknowledge,
as long as it's good. A handful of luck supposedly
brings you more than a sackful of wisdom. Lucky
to be in the right place at the right time, rubbing
elbows with the (right/wrong) people. Then again,  
what worse luck could your bad luck have saved  
you from? No cat crossed your path, no bathroom
mirror fell and shattered on the floor. Add up all
the numerals in your house number. If the total
is a round number, congratulations. It seems
you made a sound real estate choice. Whereas
one day, the furniture and belongings of the people 
who lived three houses down got thrown out on 
the curb. Random or not, that was not lucky.
 

just a joke, wasn't meant to be serious.
Why can't you lighten up, why be so thin-
skinned? It's so unnecessary. Couldn't you 
just laugh along, be a good sport? It's just life. 
It's the loudest voice that gets to go on stage 
under the spotlights. It's the ones that say 
they went on their knees and then a vision
opened up of what God intends for them. Amen.
A Destiny made Manifest. It was a skirmish, not 
a fullblown war. It was for your own good. You 
wouldn't be here now enjoying the four seasons— 
summers picking vegetables and fruit, following 
the salmon in fall. Jumping trains winter and
spring, in this big country of big, blonde men.
 

all those years of managing. With a capital 
M. By myself. As in, taking on the various jobs 
of accountant, short order cook, paper shredder,
juggler, on-call first responder. I told myself, breathless 
just meant I was getting things done. A trip downstairs 
meant an ocular survey of what I could check off my list 
both going and coming. Lug a load of laundry,  start 
the machine. Empty the old coffee filter. Drain the catch 
basket. Put away clean dishes. Toss the half-bottle of fizzy 
water gone flat. Charge the twin pack of weed whacker 
batteries. I have perhaps a B average on bathroom stall 
refinishing, but  an A+ on bidet install. At the grocery,
there are marked-down trays of fish or chicken labeled 
Manager's Special. In my case, Hell yeah. 
 

nothing short of bizarre, but with equal parts
whimsy and genius. They're a kind of diorama,
a moving show, folding and unfolding little 
grey-haired aunties into scenarios—they fly 
in and out of kitchens crowded with soy sauce 
bottles, chopstick holders, plates of steaming 
omurice and jelly salad. They dive into luggage 
with more hidden creases than the laugh lines 
on the sides of their eyes. Next thing you know, 
the suitcase opens up again. One of them has 
a motorcycle helmet on. The other climbs up
a gallery wall to join other aunties installed as
an audacious kind of Mount Rushmore above
the welting. I am telling you this is a thing.

not always about utility nor frugality. 
When we pick and gather, wash, chop, 
stir then eat and drink, there's almost 
always a sense of ceremony. From 
the holy trinity of onions, garlic, and 
tomatoes to the background strains 
of gingery broth, bitter greens and 
tamarind pucker, any improvisation 
is inspired by those who taught us: 
before you reach for your portion, 
shake some droplets on the ground, 
ladle an offering into a bowl. The first 
things you bring into any home: rice 
and salt, oil and sugar. A few coins.

the weird little tests that tripped me up, like: 
match the color of the egg to the kind of hen 
that laid it. Or: what would a room made of mirrors 
look like if there was nothing in the room to reflect 
except other mirrors? I agree that infinity is infinitely 
interesting, but the quiet inside that kind of question 
must be more intriguing. I had a teacher who once said: 
what you dislike so much will probably tell you more 
about yourself than the things you already know. 
Everyone has passed through childhood, everyone 
has coughed from clapping one chalky blackboard 
eraser against another. I've squirmed in my seat trying
to keep it in until the bathroom break. Music helped,
sometimes. Or another kind of mild distraction. 

the chief engineer of the War 
Department that McKinley called 
"our mapmaker." It was, he says, 
a quandary manifest, and moral, and 
entrepreneurial (by which we know 
it was just business as usual) when he
confessed he did not know what to do 
with an entire nation dropped into our 
laps after the Spanish-American war. 
And then he said,  one night late it 
came to me this way, for the sake of 
preventing anarchy and misrule. 
And lo, it was a kind of history that
almost seemed to write itself.