Author: Luisa A. Igloria

"A list, after all, is an incantation." ~ Lia Purpura

Stay with me a little longer. There's such
a little space between one edge and another. 
These days, we all feel smaller than any 
dream of a begging bowl carrying one spoonful 
of rice. Nothingness is a body that the tide 
carries so easily into the sea; or that the ovens 
turn so quickly into ash for someone else's
anointing. But we'll walk six miles to take 
a sack of powdered milk for a sick child. 
We'll divide rice grains into empty water 
bottles. Every warehouse will be 
a subdivision of all our common
longings. We'll take turns delivering
what we can to those in need.

You can read through a list 
of household materials to determine 
what is the best to use for a home-
made mask: cotton from an old T-shirt,
a clean panel from a vacuum cleaner bag; 
a pillow case, a dish towel. In a video,
an abuela shows how she pleats two 
strips of regular paper towel then folds
and staples each end around a rubber band.  
Now, it is possible to live-stream the northern
lights from the safety of your own home. 
Tonight, it is possible to watch a Broadway
musical or attend your sociology class without 
changing out of your pajamas. When the sun 
is out, you can still go for a walk by the river
or ride your bike around the deserted campus. 
For now, you can pick up a coffee, a sandwich  
and fries from your local café, as long as you  
drive up to the pick-up window. The rituals  
of the life that you used to know are changing  
rapidly day by day. City streets are frighteningly 
empty. Or maybe this is what they were meant
to be: stripped of all the layers of what you
used to think of only as busyness and commerce,
now you can see the sky behind the darkened billboards.
You might even see a little more beyond the pollution. 

The word boulevard and the word 
avenida each conjure a different city 
in Europe. When I was a girl, my father
said I should aim to see as many parts
of the world as I could, when I grew up:
its great libraries, for instance; the grand
bazaars and turquoise oceans, the marble
columns and great aqueducts we were taught
belonged to a time called the beginning of
civilization. After I finished college, I added
my own items to this list: I wanted to see
in the poet's room in Amherst, the white dress
with pin-tucked pleats and mother-of-pearl
buttons that Emily Dickinson wore; lay
a flower at the monument in the Warsaw 
Church where Chopin's heart was buried, after
being pickled in a jar of alcohol and smuggled
across the border. Had we but world 
enough and time, wrote Marvell; but now 
the world seems on the brink of annihilating
itself, and the only places of refuge left
are those that seem impossible to get to. 
In the aeries of Meteora, ancient monasteries balance 
on the very edge of sandstone ridges. In the past, 
monks used an elaborate system to lift worshippers 
and supplies from villages below. They raised
the chains and pulleys in times of danger, waiting 
like the cliffs for the winds of trouble to pass.   
 

Doesn't it feel as though you've been practicing

for this moment all your life? Like,

didn't your parents make sure every 

part of the plant or animal 

sacrificed for your use had some

practical application, down to the last
oily whisker and scraped

cavity of marrow bone? Weren't you told

to straighten your back and look 

without cringing at the fish eyeball 
swimming in soup? 

Your grandmother crouched through the forest,

pregnant with your mother, as bombs

fell and sniper fire zinged through the slats of night.

Your grandfather walked, prodded by bayonets, 

his arms behind his head. How many miles

before they were herded into a camp where they waited,

five men to a cot, for deliverance?

The only mantra they taught you was Be prepared.

Henceforth, even in the face of what no one could ever  

know was coming, they added to their hidden stores

of rice in the cellar, built walls of canned

goods, deposited flour and sugar and salt

down the empty mouth of every plastic container.

Bootleggers of grim hope, they were always

tensing for the future while keeping one 

eye open for an exit sign, a hidden trap-

door leading away from this moment backed against a wall.



 

I used to say, when I'm retired
     I'd like to learn to play

the cello—an instrument
     whose sound I've heard 

described as closest to
     the human voice. The score

that it will read is nearly
     complete: low volleys

in the distance signifying wars,
     shards ranged across the lines

like all the close calls and near
     misses. Most of all I dream

of learning to pull the bow in one
     continuous motion across 

that estuary of longing as the roots
    of mangroves fill with twilight. 
     
     


 
     

Though I don't notice until after I get home,
that's what it says at the very top
of my receipt, from when I went to the Asian
grocery to buy yellow mangos, loose

carrots, three bundles of ramen 
to share with my daughters, a bag 
of bok choy. He bagged them for me, too:
there being long lines and not enough

personnel. That day, the shelves 
were still full of toilet paper. Shrimp
with heads on sat bundled in plastic,
half-buried in ice. Children touched

everything in the fruit section: 
the green spikes of durian, red frills
of dragonfruit; satsumas resting on 
their own leaves. Jesus could've been

their cashier too— We'll look
back on this day and think of it
as the surest sign of our days being
reckoned, added up at the till.   

   were raised on sugar and water;
or milk and water, or rice
   and beans, which convert
eventually to sugar and water.
   The first shock
administered to our bodies
   was that of air. After that,
we forgot about the tunnels of blood,
   the months of rocking where we
were the boat and the darkness the only
   sea that could hold us without tiring.
Our bodies long for just enough
   ferment. For dust to mean nothing 
more harmless than what sticks to our palms
   as we shape flour and water into bread.
What is our citizenship but the landscape
   of bodies dredged out of the same ocean,
all of us stumbling in the general direction 
   of heat, or that lighthouse pulsing in the distance.

Are you preparing
      to count the days?
Everything is more quiet.

On TV, we see the first
      drive-through tents
pitched in hospital parking lots.

Otherwise it is 
      spring or beginning 
to look like spring.

From the blood
      of the recovered, a serum
might be produced in two months.

Tulip magnolia,
      Bradford pear; first tight
whorls breaking out on branches.

Nothing looks terrible
      until it is. The moon,
however, is still bright 

for a beat-up skillet. 
      We swallow zinc.
When we can, we sit in the sun. 

   used to reveal how fire
      sweeping through the continent
was visible from high up
   in space——From that ledge
      presumably occupied by the gods?
from the cold white bramble
   woven of stars? What do they see
      now as cities retreat into themselves,
as factory chimneys inhale their last
   plumes of dark smoke, as a new-
      born child takes its first
breath in this poisoned world—— 
 

Today we are staining 
the fence a deep shade 
of cedar, since the contractor
told us the three month period 
of curing is over. What they mean
by curing is that the planks
of new-cut wood have been 
left awhile to the elements,
have hardened a little more 
after being left like that
by themselves. Soft
traces of green around the grain 
have started to darken in spots: 
meaning they've tasted equal 
lashings of heat and rain,
plummeting cold, blue-
black wind. It's almost peaceful,
following the rhythm with each
pass of the roller and the brush.
But cure is also, in Medieval Latin, 
curare—responsibility for souls; or
the restoration of the body to health.   
No one in the world as of tonight
knows how to heal the sick, 
the dying, the dead stacked in fields
for mass burial. One by one, 
quarantined towns empty and citizens
retreat into isolation. In Lobpuri,
where tourists no longer come, bands 
of monkeys have been seen fighting over 
a scrap of food in the square. 
But in Siena, one night the townspeople
open their windows and as if on accord,
begin singing "Canto della Verbena.”