Author: Luisa A. Igloria

At the heart hospital, I lie on the imaging
      table, looking up at the bland ceiling 
while the technician gets ready to slick
      gel on one end of the transducer. In this
soundproofed room, we don't hear the traffic
      thickening on Brambleton. But when she engages
the Doppler, waves of gray appear on the bottom
      of the screen and a whooshing sound pulses near
my ear— like wind across a beach, waves coming in
      and eddying around the twin islands of
my kidneys. The vascular ultrasound machine
      has opened this window into my own interior
and suddenly I'm reminded of how my body can feel 
      spacious or cluttered in ways I forget 
on a daily basis— like when I struggle with 
      the waistband of a pair of old jeans, or feel 
the hot burn of spice travel from my mouth, down 
      through my esophagus. The technician tells me 
to hold my breath and I do, while on the screen, 
      something flickers and pulses, still keeping time 
in spite of me. Blue, she tells me, is the track of
      blood flowing away; and red, toward the organ. 
I am traveler and terrain, vessel and cargo, 
      the untranslatable rendered legible.

The thin veined leaves— I see 
their undersides as they turn 

toward window light. You know you're in 
the presence of language that speaks 

from the depths when you feel the skin 
trying to keep it all in. As soon as my head 

touches the pillow, the ghosts of my dead 
crowd around me like petals. If they wanted it, 

I'd offer my heart to them like a sweet. 
But they say they don't. Their fingers comb 

through my hair the way wind moves down 
the limbs of the crepe myrtle. After a good 

shaking, the earth around it is covered 
with drifts of pale purple and pink.

Do they offer instruction, warning, hope? 
They only circle my head like moons 

freed from their usual orbit. I keep trying to break 
language into patterns that will mean something 

beyond myself. I think of the mulberries I picked 
from a friend's garden, how even as half of them 

sank into swift ferment, their skin still gleamed. 
Night, too, presses its blue bruise against 

the house walls. Everything can fold back into itself, 
and my ghosts slip back like leaves into the pages of

a book. After, the air feels like it does after someone 
has said something so real, it becomes unrepeatable

Of course I know it's bait. 
The algorithm seems clairvoyant, 
every ad on my feed picking up 
on that one time I stopped to read
the made-up stories of silver-
haired couples, probate lawyers, 
locked accounts, missing passwords 
and how touch and facial recognition 
no longer work when you're dead. 
It's almost sweet, the way they pitch
the idea of a clean finish. But also
there's threat (think of signatures
aligned like teeth) behind the smooth,
imagined voice that says order now 
what you'll need at the end if you really 
care for those who'll have to clean up 
your mess. I restrain the impulse to buy— 
the plot, the planner, the tidy record 
keeper— not already gone, not quite
leaving nor convinced I'm turning 
into the ghost of me. 

 
takes small steps on the ocean floor,  
     looking overdressed, theatrical, 
awkward— I recognize the feeling:  
              of being visible in ways I can't 
control, but moving forward anyway
     while pretending nothing's wrong. 
But maybe the batfish is a diva. 
              She can walk on the tips 
of her fins and doesn't care 
     if anyone's watching. And maybe 
there's nothing wrong, since shame  
              is an invention that keeps us 
from inhabiting our own joy. 
     What's gravity when you can tiptoe-
float through water, the spots 
              on your front and back 
rippling with reflected light,
     announcing your arrival?  

The average lifespan  
   is four thousand weeks, give or take.

What should we do
       with our allotment?

In this economy of days, 
   a work week is held in contrast

to paid time off or vacations.
        Doing nothing is still 

a form of doing and there are many fine
    forms of doing nothing— sitting

in a cathedral built of slow 
        mornings, sleeping while rain

divides into currencies you'll  
     eventually give up counting. 

The days wrap around you sometimes 
        like a thin clinical gown,

neither cloth nor paper. 
     You can wear it to open in front 

or in the back. Either way, you are 
        easier to access. Forget your bad 

hip, your bum shoulder. They're mere 
     distractions when you want to take 

time peeling an orange, releasing its scent
        as you pull pith away from flesh. 

I tell the specialist I'm exhausted. Not the ordinary 
kind of tired but a tired that feels bone-deep, comes on
suddenly and without warning hands me gears to a machine 
I'm now supposed to steer indefinitely. I grit my teeth 

just to get through the day. I'm tired not because  
I had one too many salt-rimmed drinks, or binged

episode after episode of Grantchester. She scrolls 
through my files, and my history pops up like an old
neighborhood: biopsy fifteen years ago, atypical 
breast hyperplasia. Menopause, the threshold  

I passed, lined with night sweats and mood swings. 
She says this late, hormone replacement won't help;

and in fact might increase the risk for strokes, 
heart attack, cancer. What can help? I ask. I still 
have so many things I want to do! She says I'll have 
to discuss this further with my primary care doctor, 

explore other avenues. Then— just like that— she pauses
over my hands. Where did you get your nails done? 

I tell her they're stickers, a set my daughter ordered
online from Japan. No gel, no ammonia, and they last 
at least two weeks. She calls in the resident and 
the assistants, delighted. They marvel at the gloss

and artful gradations of color. It's as if I've become 
a wonder, an amazing specimen instead of just another 

problematic body. She apologizes for not being more
helpful but thanks me for teaching her something new. 
I walk back to the parking garage, my tired body   
somehow still capable of offering beauty. 

It's what they ask for
when they want to know 

what was cut, filled, 
altered; removed, taken,

and how much. Trees do
what they do, with or

without witness. Water,
too, will seek its way

through stone. Method
is the preferred way

of building the record,
with language that holds

what it's given to carry.
But there are times 

the record is more of
invention: a shift

in the shape of things,
the making of something

that will have no ability 
to reply to a question.

~ for Drew

A train of thought might begin with overheard 
conversation— for instance, on the next thing 
in a line of recent decisions over which we 
were not consulted, though these will have 
a bearing on everything we're expected to do. 
Then a colleague posts about getting to this 
point in the semester and how it's been a journey 
as it's always been, but somehow, each time gets
more lackluster. Lackluster, meaning a lack of shine, 
a surface polished only by thoughtless repetition, 
a dulling from slipshod use rather than intention. 
Jaques uses the word in "All the World's a Stage," 
the same play that gave us gems like Sweet 
are the uses of adversity. A fool's wisdom, 
perhaps. And so he plays his part. To look 
upon the hour as mere trial, the next car 
on the train as just another clone of this one— 
wheels on the rails and rumbling into the dingy 
station because there's a schedule, and schedules 
must be met or someone pays the price. 
Now we toil in halls grown airless as balloons 
from which the last bit of helium has been 
extracted for a profit we'll never see. 
Professing beauty and humanity in a time 
distracted by speed and efficiency, stubbornly 
we practice our own fools' wisdom, sit shoulder 
to shoulder in a train lurching forward, ever forward.  

Dark oceans across which people are ferried
into captivity— five hundred faces blued 
      by water pierced by moonlight,

pieced together to form a vessel measuring 
      twenty-four feet 

Even then the sea understands how many
could be lost at once to fire
      or storms, in this way becoming souls

Out west, on a runway, a person jumps a fence
      and walks directly in the path of Flight 4345 

Air traffic control repeats the phrase
for rescuers to confirm the number of people 
      who might need removal or extraction

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Rendering, meaning to portray or capture
a likeness in another medium, as when
an artist might render a portrait in oils. 
Also, to make or cause; to tear apart or 
lacerate. As in I am rendered speechless, 
dumb with hurt, heart stricken at the edges 
of what suffers but that I don't know how 
to fix. Gristle and fat are rendered after
the slow boil and the skimming, as if 
that kind of tending might soften bone. 
I am afraid to do damage, even when the work
promises to be tender. Like gathering berries 
that are ripe and ready— barely any resistance 
to fingers plucking them off the branch, then 
dropping them into a bowl held in the other 
hand. Thick vines spill their unruly fragrance 
from the trellis: that, too, can speak to grief.