Author: Luisa A. Igloria

the uncanny distribution of quakes 
all over the globe,  some deadlier than
others— Did the tortoise in the center 
of the earth finally tire of shouldering 
our burdens and maybe step away from 
the pillar that holds everything in place? 
Yesterday, towers stood like gleaming 
sheaths beneath the broiling sun as though 
they would withstand  every form of violence. 
Yesterday, a sinkhole yawned open at the exit 
from the freeway. Days bare their teeth and 
gums. The wind smears pastes of insect
bodies on glass. I am trying not to think
of these as plagues pouring out of the sky.

the small graft that took, the barely green
patched into the rootstock of another. Or
whip and tongue, cleft together. Meaning,
a wound is made to shorten the time 
it takes to fruit or flower.  Virgil wrote 
of where the buds push forth amidst 
the bark, and burst the membranes  
thin, but we only talk about toughening 
the skin. Legends say the dimpled fruit,
bruised by a forest fairy's fingers, turned
from bitter to syrup in the mouth. Every
change adds another layer. How fortunate
we are to pick and choose what to leave
behind, what to make part of our insides.

the exhaustion. The drooping in armchairs
at 1 PM.  The restless tossing in bed through 
the night, the laggardly rising in the morning.
Dreams kaleidoscope into a language needing
urgent translation. Outside, in the garden,
birds bicker over a breakfast of shreds.
Does it matter? All next week, plumes of dust 
will move from the Sahara into our airspace.
Particulates may trigger asthma or allergies,
but also exceptional sunsets. Every known fact
delivers us faster to ourselves and our famously
vulnerable nature.  But so does everything we 
hold in ignorance, in abeyance. Come, lift that
pallid shawl. Let's raise a glass to the unknown.

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.