Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Fragile spark, flame you cup to keep
from sputtering. Mind it doesn’t die out,  
this fire handed down from one to another 
down the centuries. An edict, a wish, a talisman.
A dream, messages inked on your bones by forebears 
who knew to find the hinge where the tip of a spear 
could find its target. Bloody skirmish on the shore
(it wouldn’t be the last),  after a portal opened 
and three-masted ships with broadsides and
falconets brought their hunger from across 
the ocean. Bite of peppercorn and cardamom,
burnish of clove and cassia bark. The letter 
from the ancestors is brief: Don’t let the heat 
turn remnant. Shelter its energy in stone.

*

Living is the oldest war in the world. Out walking,
and twilight leans in. Streetlights blink as if everything

needs to grow accustomed to the dark. Hands
in your pockets against the cold— when did you  

learn to curl them close into themselves, in secret? 
People gather in lit-up spaces filled with song 

and noise. You push the door open, slide
into a seat. Here too, while joining in,

you’ve learned to rearrange those parts of yourself 
at once rawer and softer, the ones you learned to

shelter from even joy.  While glad for welcome, you
never entirely lift  your hand from the dial, always 

taking measure. The list of the wind, any draft 
that could snuff out the fragile spark you carry.

*

You walk into this life each morning
as if it was the first day over again and you,
one of the new arrivals to this world. Brush
your teeth, straighten your collar in the mirror,
practice the length or shortness of vowels
your tongue still trips over sometimes. Quickly 
self-correct in front of a roomful of eyes. It’s still 
winter but bodies with skin the same color as yours 
are yanked into the streets in their underwear or 
dragged through the broken windows of their cars. 
Long a, short a. Not pliss, please. Inhale, exhale.
A custom is a habit. A customs is an inspection.
You breathe the indifferent air, you know you must.
Keep walking. Living is the oldest war in the world.

*

High up on my left thigh, a brown mole,
its tint muted by time. I used to wonder
if this could be listed as one of my
"identifying features"— what's meant 
when describing the shape of your nose,
how your brows arch or careen to the left 
while the other lies inert as a tent 
that could never be raised. Most 
of the time I forget it's even there. 
Not something to register, stepping out 
of the shower and toweling off. My mother 
had moles across her back— a page out of 
connect-the-dots coloring books like the ones
she bought so I could amuse myself and never
be bored. Connect the dots, from one to ten 
to fifty to almost a hundred, the age she 
would have been had she not passed away 
at ninety. After I gave birth to my first
child, she handed me a warmed-up cup
of coconut oil to stroke across my
belly. For the stretch marks, she said.
For helping speed up the skin's snapping
back to the state it was before it
was marked by life, if I was lucky. 

The bottom drawer holding sweaters and 
scarves: you can't make it stick, except 
with a wad of cardboard. The refrigerator 
leans slightly to the right, resting against 
a wooden block you inserted between its shoulder 
and the wall. The jagged line across the counter 
panels, invisible until you look under the top: 
like the view of a crooked gap in the teeth 
of someone when they finally smile with their 
whole mouth. There's so much inventory you 
can list of the mismatched, the propped-
up, the almost falling down. Your dream,
when you dreamed of a house, was of floors
that flowed smooth as the afternoon light
falling on them through windows. Rooms
you could almost hear breathing, before
the years filled them with clothes and 
furniture, small appliances that chimed  
or sang the start of the day or the end  
of a washing cycle. You want to apologize
to keys and quilts, bottles of cleaner 
under the sink, the orange in the fruit
bowl and the banana that turned mushy— 
at least explain how all you wanted was 
an orderly life, the magic of simplicity
and alignment. But they remind you again
that this is what it is. And if you are
tender to yourself, you'll hear and 
maybe even smell the rain falling on 
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled 
map of this life which shows you there 
are still wildnesses left unexplored. 
  

It isn't only nonhuman creatures who live
       on sweetness that turns to rot,

on flesh before it shrinks to carrion
       then bone. Sometimes, we have 

no choice. We solder what scraps 
       we find, fashion these into armor, 

knowing how the body underneath is
       a lesson in smallness and easy 

bruising. The moon spills silver. 
       Even the desert holds its breath 

when dark shadows pass overhead, ready 
       to swoop down for the kill: the signal 

to fold in on ourselves. Consider the iron-
       clad beetle, plated with warts. 

It rolls over in the face of danger,  
       turns into the very idea of death.  

It clicks so still, the world mistakes  
       its blue for gone. I want to learn 

this trick, train my body to disappear 
       in plain view until the coast 

is clear. To come back alive, still 
       stubborn, unruined, not yet done.

I remember Star Café on Session Road, the place
my father and his friends gathered for a brew.
For me, a cold bottle of chocolate milk; a plate

of fries, homework spread out on the oily table.
Waiters balanced plates of noodles, walking through
iconic Star Café on Session Road. Now, no trace

of this haunt that held memories with such grace.
And fewer, now, the pines that fog can sidle through.
Cold beads on a glass of chocolate milk— that glaze

bends my focus to that faraway childhood place.
Remember egg pie, quail eggs in oyster sauce? Who
still remembers Star Café on Session Road, a place

where time moved on yet anchored itself in place,
in memory? Hands moved pieces over chessboards. Who
knew how much I'd miss Star Cafe, this ordinary place 
whose doors swung open to a cold glass, a warm plate.

We don't have to lie when we're incredible.
Believe the way you walk into the room, then.
Take possession of the air. The AC's the lie— 
carefully controlled temperature that lies
between don't melt or scorch. The chandelier
tinkles faintly. Greenery's espaliered against
the wall. But you can rearrange any disbelief
so it shreds like cheap plastic. Saliently
discomfited that you show up in this milieu
(where youth and beauty believe the lie about
their superiority), the jurors lie: they "always 
had you in their sights." In lieu of praise,
a token. In lieu of acceptance, the chance 
to be redeemed by those holier than you.  

Just once I knew what life was for.
The hoarders though, once they got
their hands on it, said once is not
enough. Ones, tens, twenties, currency
in whatever form whet one's appetite
for more and more. For a taste, just once
what would you give or give up? Once, we
lined up for ashes, the ones drawn in
the shape of a cross: reminder that wants
are different from needs, that once this
life is done, one's status and wealth are
of no consequence. Once upon a time, I
wanted just as much and hard as any. 
Once, I thought I knew what life was for. 

He said his aunt went missing 
last week; she'd managed to slip
out of the house when her husband
was at work, and wandered the streets
of their North Carolina town until she 
was found nearly at dusk. She went
past houses with fences, houses with 
boxwood hedges, the hardware store 
and the shoe repair shop at the corner; 
the elementary school playground with  
swings and bright climbing equipment,
the trains carrying coal rumbling 
along the tracks at the edge of town. 
Farther and farther, not knowing south 
or east or west. Her thin housecoat 
must have fluttered in the still-cold 
February air, its flaps like endpapers 
of a well-thumbed atlas, each map in it 
pointing to the only destination she knew.
When the police found her and gently asked
where she was going, why of course didn't 
they know, she was walking home to Guyana? 
Isn't it something— how even when the mind 
is drifting deeper into a fog, the heart 
remembers a place as surely as the day 
it first pushed off from that warmer shore.