Author: Luisa A. Igloria

My friend shows me his arthritic 
fingers, and I try to click my trigger 
thumb. But he can't hear the noise 
it makes because of the vacuum cleaner 
sounds made by the tinnitus in his ear. 
I suppose we're getting to the age 
when we can start to tell the difference 
between a dull hurt and a door that's 
permanently closed, between the new-new 
shine of chrome encasing a cheap plastic
interior and the unpolished gleam of a body
whose limp is louder than its mind. The world
loves words like résumé, strategic, and 
effective positioning. It rewards the one
who hasn't even earned their name,
the one who hasn't stood at the edge of
an ultimatum or answered a call at midnight
which rearranged the entire plot of a life.
I sometimes take my graduation ring 
out of its box and wear it, just to remind
myself I know some shit. I've learned
that forgive doesn't mean forget, but also
how shame burns hot at first but you can
learn to outlast it. Becoming is long, hard 
work, and I know I only have these ordinary 
days to build from, to cobble some light 
even from failure for the rest of the path.

My husband, who cooks on weekends,
goes on the internet to find out when 
weekends became a thing. In ancient Rome, 
every eighth day was market day. During 
the Han dynasty, officials took every fifth 
day off to rest and wash their hair. 
In the early nineteenth century, factory 
owners and laborers came to an agreement 
that work could stop at two on Saturday 
afternoon, as long as people would come 
to work sober on Monday. It wasn't until 
1940 that the Fair Labor Standards Act 
formalized the forty-hour workweek 
and the two-day weekend. Some people
wanted more time for beer, others
for prayers. Some people sit idling
at their desks, then promptly shut down
their computers at 5:01. It's as if
the ceiling had changed to a different
color. Some colleagues advise me to ignore 
work email on weekends, even when my Inbox 
column glows with insistent green dots 
at 10 PM. My youngest daughter says,
productivity and optimalization are concepts
of the capitalist machine. Why shouldn't rest
also be legislated? Heat up leftovers, or make
a small meal from scratch. Make tea, write 
in your notebook, make valentines with your 
second-grader. Think of a nap as an achievement, 
as well as the whole history behind your being where 
you are: here, when it could have been otherwise.

There are rooms from which I know I departed 
too quickly.

Displacement is its own unstable architecture.

I can never completely erase what was faint 
if it was persistent to begin with.

When I take my first clear breath after illness, 
the world smells both sharp and tender.

I remember echoes in stairwells, and streetcorners where
small flames were tended in the service of our hungers.

There are flowers that don't recognize boundaries.

We should learn from them that nothing wild is 
ever made to be captive.

Breath can rise even from the cracked earth.

There are days when you get 
some good traction and the load 
you push, though it hasn't gotten 
lighter, slides forward. But 
there are other days when
the stone doesn't budge. 
You make a notch in the earth 
with your shoe or find some other 
way to prop it up for a while, 
so you can nap or go eat 
chocolate-covered popcorn
and get your fingers sticky,
which means you'll have to wash up
at the sink, by which time you realize 
what you actually want to do is take 
a long, hot shower, use the bar of 
jasmine soap you were saving for some 
forgotten reason. Just a little 
time to breathe without bracing
for the next thing to drop,
for the next addition to the weight
you never saw coming. You know
relief can come in the in-between,
uneven spaces, some mercy small
as a smile or a touch of a hand.
Though the weight hasn't grown lighter 
you are trying to understand how it 
doesn't necessarily mean you have failed 
at the carrying, that your life isn't 
just the color and shape of this stone.

I've been told to stop apologizing
for things over which no one has 

any control. And yet, all these years,
I still can't stop saying I'm sorry

for the circumstances that made  
the distances I thought we were 

trying in our own way to bridge 
now seem insurmountable. To say

I no longer want to have anything
to do with you is a choice, just as

it is to say I would not close that 
door completely. Every day, I fan 

my wishes out like cards on the table. 
That wherever you are, mornings 

are gentle and the winds warm; that you 
understand your name could never be 

spoken in anger. That remembrance 
walks behind us quietly, but following.

The main character in a Dutch
movie announces to everyone: 

this is the day she is going 
to die. She lies down in her own  

bed without a fuss, untroubled, 
certain of what will happen.

Perhaps she is done with all
the negotiations, all the upkeep

that life requires of her— done
with farming and raising children,

done with chasing and refusing
sex, patching up quarrels, standing

up to injustice, stretching a pay-
check, bulking up a meal. Done

too with the Sunday suppers in 
the garden, the long, earnest 

conversations with friends deep 
into the night. But how did she know, 

how does anyone know? It's not like you're 
given a ticket or schedule, a station or 

terminal. It's not like a clock on the mantel 
that you can hear winding down. But some insist 

you will know when it's time— perhaps 
when the floating world grows even more 

transparent, every bubble brightening 
imperceptibly just as it starts to dissolve. 

A thousand meters deep
     in the zone called mesopelagic, 
a lanternfish lifts its tiny row
     of photophores, offering to slip it 
into the ocean's voluminous sleeves. 
     Nightly it rises toward the surface
to feed on plankton. By itself,
     its gleam is a sliver. But millions
of them shimmer the water with
     tinfoil. Their light is endogenous—
meaning they produce it with their own
     bodies. What an astonishment: to find 
inside of us two sticks or flint and steel, 
     what it might take to start a flame. 

Not yet erased from a stone  
slab in the yard: a single 

footprint of an animal, visible 
in the almost dark just as snow 

has started to fall. Was it lame 
or hurt, or bounding away from 

some pursuer? We too move through 
this uncertain space that every 

day feels more abandoned by light. 
But somehow our bodies carry us in

the dark, and we stretch our arms 
forward, feeling for the shape 

of something solid or a hand to pull 
us in the right direction toward 

home. Isn't that what we all want? 
If stingless honeybees in the rain-

forests of the Amazon have been granted
the legal right to exist and thrive 

and be legally represented when harmed
or threatened, why should our breaths

and voices not rise above a hum or leap
toward sounds that call to us in welcome?

Nineteen pairs of eyes train
themselves on the front of the room,
perhaps on me, perhaps on an interesting
spot on the whiteboard. We are doing 
close reading, and already I see some  
slumped slightly in their chairs or leaning
toward the end of the hour. They want to know 
what it is exactly they should know to pass
this course, what it is exactly I am
supposed to want from them. These days
the world is always using words like
faster, more efficient, and optimize—
as if the mind were a flat rate box
stuffed with content on an assembly 
line, then taped and pushed down 
a chute. I long for those times we
lingered over the pages of a favorite 
book read more than once, for mornings 
unspooling toward afternoon and evening 
along with sentences so brilliant, I 
couldn't get them out of my head.

In the tissue-lined channels of my body, 
the cells of my children drift like lanterns.
They flicker with messages encoded long ago,
carrying bits of story that remain on this
side of the water. Outside, they row
in the wind through their own cartography,
sometimes returing to the port of their first
origins. Sometimes I am the lighthouse keeper,
and sometimes I am my own vessel, trying
like them to breach treacherous depths
to reach a calmer sea. Across the years
and all this distance, I want to believe
there is still a quiet hum of signals at 
cellular level, and that as long as they 
are there, none of us could ever be lost.