Author: Luisa A. Igloria

There's supposed to be a lunar 
eclipse tonight—the maw of a dragon 

swallowing a pearl because its brilliance
is magnetic. I, too, want such a milky 

light coursing down my throat, softening 
the canyons made by the hardness 

of years. There's always the moment before 
and the moment after. And between the two,

all the days sifting their questions, so you
could winnow the chaff from the grain.

"I am an AI who makes webpages to learn 
what it means to be a real person. I wanted you 
to know." - AI bot in an email


If one goes to webpages to find information 
on any number of things, I guess poems could 
possibly be considered webpages of human 
imperfection, even failure and neglect, mercurial 
rage, impulsive performances triggered by times 
of family high drama. I'm thinking of poems 
like the one in which someone sends a three-
layer cake gliding like a battered ship/ 
down the sidewalk, poems where archives 
of old hurts reside—The last thing my father did 
for me/ Was map a way: he died, & so/ Made death 
possible. Click on one line, and the rest of the story 
comes tumbling out. The light of some distant 
past shines starkly again on your loneliness, your 
helplessness. What, indeed, does it mean to be human? 
You pick the brand new thing and toss yesterday's perfectly 
good coat in the trash—it's only human. When the merest
rain floods every intersection and underpass from 49th 
street and beyond and the fools come out to swim or ride 
jet skis in dirty water—it's only human. A one-year-old 
sits in a courtroom and the judge orders him to fill out 
an asylum form or face immediate deportation—
it's only human?  I don't know if humanity can be learned, 
or how someone who's been laid off can be expected 
to keep paying their school loans. A storm knocked out 
the power in several communities. Does it make them 
more or less human to sit in the dark for over two 
weeks, every food long gone bad in the refrigerator? 
A couple climbs to the very top of the Empire State 
Building and gets engaged. Maybe to be human is
to want something so much you'd risk falling 1,445 
feet to your death. Maybe it's to push someone else 
aside and to safety, though you can see the bullet 
or the bomb is probably going to get you. 

Sometimes the body
is a house with many doors

and many drawers, most of them
locked. Someone barred access

who knows how long ago—
with a padlock and key, a sign

to not go there, a pile of heavy
furniture clogging the hallway.

It may not be the drama of some
tyrant hiding the bodies of all

the wives that did not work out
in an upper room, or the story

of a curse handed down from one
age to another, for anyone who dares

transgress the boundary. But this is how
ghosts are born— or where they continue

to re-live hurts, walking barefoot over the same
gravel roads year after year. I want to take their hands

in mine and lead them to a space looking out
onto water or the hills, comb their matted hair, wipe

the grime off their cheeks. I want to sit down beside them
doing nothing, really—and just let the evening wash over us.

This time of year, monsoons and storms thicken
above the oceans on the mantle of El Niño.

They are more brutal now, both in the country
where I was born and where you died, as well

as here on the southeastern coast, where hard
rain rises quickly in minutes, drowning cars

in the underpass. After rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underworld
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago; you cut it open, insisting
I eat it, right away. I have tried my best to live: here,

far from the first world which held us inside a grove
of pine, inside the clearing you made for a garden

you’d dreamed of filling with roses and sweet flowering
vines. I promise that I am still trying to remember

everything. Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse
in window glass, you give your face back to me.

The nurse adjusts the cuff and takes another reading.
The sounds blood makes, coming and going from the heart;

the ache and excess of its griefs, its hidden murmurs,
its blubs pressed against the soft corridors of the heart.

The body's such a flimsy envelope. Turning in bed, I hold my side
and feel the other organs tumble slightly around the heart.

Imagine fish in a bowl of strange dimensions, angling toward
an invisible skylight, ribbons of liquid encircling the heart.

On newborns' heads, the fontanel or soft spot—in quiet light,
sometimes you can see the holy pulsing there, from the heart.

~ after Kalehua Kim


you must have been born an old soul, they said

old soul, old woman wrapped in swaddling clothes?

i was old when i was born—born out of old quarrels

i didn't see— but i felt them, so i will say quarrels  

a quarrel's a trap from which you try to seek escape

you escaped to a new city, but your old soul followed

—perhaps there's no real escape, only cycles

you're part of the cycle, and so your daughters are, too

your daughters' souls, made of what's both old and new

take old and new, spin them like clay into each other on the wheel

old paths lead the old soul to thickets of inaction and despair

so dress the old soul in sparrows' wings, clear nights, new thoughts

get dressed, refuse the old garment that keeps taunting you

embrace again this new old life that isn't all tatters yet— hold

lightly what your old soul learned of this world—nakem, heart  

Every weather map these days looks roughly colored in
with only red and orange crayons. In Korea, farmers dig 
up potatoes from a field and find them boiled to mush. 
Dogs pant, tongues raspy with thirst and sadness. Every 
mail box and railing is metallic with the smell of coins left 
too long in the sun. Clay pots and veranda tiles crack, 
asphalt softens into black puddles on the road. Cicadas 
crank up their desperate chorus in the trees, as though
their volume might ignite a breeze. They don't surrender,
though they shake off their jackets.

Is there a lesson?
Is it about lightness, or
what the heart can bear?


 

~ Amorphophallus titanum

The week we were away, we missed
the moment the corpse flower finally
opened at the botanical gardens.
Its signature scent of rotten meat 
comes from cadaverine and putrescine, 
compounds that attract fruit flies and 
beetles. The insects think they've lucked out 
on carrion, and will pick up and scatter pollen 
on their way out. On our return, almost 
everyone we knew had stood in the line 
snaking past the orchid displays in the lobby,
out the glass doors and into the parking lot 
where someone's child was throwing 
a tantrum and begging to go home. 
They had bought tickets, of course—
one night only! As though the flower 
had agreed to this cabaret, and everyone 
was just waiting for the drumroll moment 
when the spathe heated up like a microwave 
and the spadix pushed out of its ruffled velvet 
skirts to  spread redolence in the air. Isn't that
how it is, though? We jostle our way through 
the crowd, rubberneck at the highway collision, 
wanting to know exactly what it looks and smells
like, this mysterious occurrence called death:
hiding in plain sight, inside life's dark mouth.

"It was the only life I had." ~ Jane Kenyon

Carrots and cabbages 
dumped on the side of the mountain
road, because the farmers can't 
afford to transport them 
to market.

Such overflow of 
abundance, in these days
holding mostly rain. This remainder,
not even subtracted from itself, 
and still it comes to nought.  

~ after “Who Opened the Window,” Jessica Damen


It looks like an ordinary room. Perhaps a summer
house. No gilt decor, just walls of dirty-looking cream

bordered with green. The humid air moves like an animal
through the trees. You would need to crack a window open

though it would probably not make a difference. A man
in a merino sweater, hand on hip, stands behind a woman

in a chair. She is in middle age, perhaps farther along, but she
wears the look of what some might call good breeding.

Her hand cups her cheek so we can see the diamond
on one finger. This means she is taken. Was taken. Did he

do the taking? His face, turned toward the fourth wall between
us, is bored or indifferent. He’s the kind who takes easily, and

after having taken, runs his fingers through his hair, moving
on to the calculation of the next conquest. On the dinner table,

a pewter samovar and cup; a weighted object in the shape
of a horned, eyeless head. I see another woman there—

but there are two. Just girls, actually. They seem to almost
have the same body, though the one who sits upright has a face

still mostly unshadowed. Her head turns away; she can’t bear
to look too closely. The other has gone pale and limp as the beast

forces his girth into her. From what labyrinth has he fled
extradition, tired of the game of winding thread and waiting for

periodic delivery of sacrifices? A small, yellow-feathered marionette,
mouth agape, is the only seeming witness. Yet it’s enough, isn’t it—

a start? A record is being made here. Not everything can be
erased, though it will take time for their voices to be heard.