Author: Luisa A. Igloria

- after “Persephone” (2015) by Judith Schaechter

Here, it isn’t winter yet, though the spiked 
leaf of the holly is its herald. Among the dry 

rattle-pods and hairless weeds, a single 
blood-red stem sends its network of roots 

into the earth, a system interrupted 
by cells of dormant seeds: crimson 

and indigo, ending in the hollow where 
she is trapped or where, depending on how 

you’d like to retell her story, she prepares 
to break through that ceiling. She’s not 

too far away from the surface: it looks 
as though she only needs to give one last 

firm push with her left foot against a ledge 
of rock in her enclosure, and she might stand, 

clearing the blurry border between above 
and below with a shower of soil and loamy 

gravel. Except now she must do it alone: 
the mother is nowhere in the picture, and 

neither is the infamous lord of her abduction. 
Only one insistent flower tethers her to 

this world, and neither of them lets go. 

That spring, when I shared space
in a cramped AirBnB RV trailer 
with one of my daughters, 

I couldn't remember taking off 
the intricate beaded necklace 
I'd brought to wear

at a conference, though I remember 
putting it on that last morning. 
But when we went our separate 

ways, she flying off to North 
Carolina and me back to Virginia, 
I couldn't find any trace of it 

in my purse or in my luggage. 
For a moment, but only just, 
I thought about e-mailing 

the owner to ask her
to help me look for it. But   
if I couldn't remember if I 

still had it on when we returned,
then couldn't it be anywhere? 
I could sigh about how much 

it had cost, how women in South 
Africa threaded each bead to make 
such striking geometric shapes. 

But I thought of Bishop's door 
keys, her mother's watch, her 
rivers, homes, and continents; 

a quake, a storm swirling its spiked 
coronet over the Pacific. There's 
disaster, then there is disaster.   

(with a line from Dilruba Ahmed)


at first
with tenderness and then

with fierce intensity,
the myths of childhood

merge with those 
of older age. the bed

sheets wet with effluvia
and vegetable matter, 

the windows streaked
with fingerprints.

in the yellow glow,
the widow moves from one

streetlamp to another,
like a spider looking

to jump on an electric 
current in the air. 

Nobody said it would be easy.
Nobody said you can take it 
all back because you're tired 
or you find out it doesn't work. 
Nobody said your heart could fill 
like a reservoir and then
go bone dry the next day. 
Nobody can give you what you want 
that you can't find in a swirled 
tulip on the foam of an expensive 
coffee, or in the lay-away folds 
of a heavy winter coat. So what 
do you do with the screen that sticks 
between the window and the wind, 
with the suitcase's broken zipper 
and the pile of neatly folded 
underclothes? Nobody told you
an orange moon means nothing 
good could ever be coming 
your way. Nobody said a coin 
or a button couldn't be used 
as a piece in chess or monopoly, 
that a regular microphone 
couldn't double for karaoke
as long as you can find 
song lyrics on your phone.   
  

Today I wear the round 
beaded earrings with fringed 
golden tassels my eldest
daughter got for me, made 
by women who live in Lake Sebu, 
famous for the T'boli weave 
they make called t'nalak— 
stripped abacá bark, organically 
dyed of bark and leaves, each 
ripply panel the equivalent 
of a chapter from a dream. 
I wonder what pattern 
I could pull from my own 
dreams, especially if 
I've forgotten about them 
as soon as I open my eyes.
I think everyone should be 
given a chance to make something 
tangible from a dream at least 
once: a recipe dictated in 
a dream, a dress with glorious 
detail they've only ever seen
in a dream. A mural or 
collage in which wild-
flowers open their mouths
like a choir to sing the most
unforgettable songs never  
heard by the human ear. 
 

My husband loves the part in Les Misérables 
when a man pinned under the wheels of a cart

is begging for help, but no one in that busy
marketplace moves to rescue him except

for the ex-convict Jean Valjean AKA Mayor
Madeleine. Valjean crawls beneath the cart 

and with nearly superhuman strength lifts it 
to free the man. In my opinion this counts

as a deadlift, which according to all 
the dictionaries I've consulted 

literally means the lifting of a dead 
weight from the ground, oftentimes from 

a squatting position. Javert, the town's 
police inspector, is instantly reminded 

of the only man he's ever seen do such 
a thing— a prisoner who can't quite shuck 

his thieving habits and is on the lam again 
soon after his release. Then there's the stone 

that archaeologists unearthed from ancient 
times in Olympia, Greece, with a handprint 

on it and the inscription "Bybon, son of Phola, 
lifted me over his head with one hand." I don't  

know anything else about Bybon, but this week I read 
on social media a story about a seven-year-old boy 

of Filipino and Hmong ancestry who's training
to deadlift three times his weight; he says he 

owes his strength to his favorite food, lumpia. 
When I tell this story to a new poet friend, 

he thinks I'm talking about the cumbia, a dance 
originating in Panama or Colombia, in which 

partners step back then front, front then back, 
while rhythmically swaying hips and arms to mild 

percussion. To dance passably well you can't 
drag your feet around like stones, so there's that 

to be said about a kind of similarity to what 
the weightlifter aims to do: hoist a weight even 

for a few clean seconds, in seeming defiance of 
the gravity that keeps wanting to take us down 

to our usual abject position in mud and muck. 
So we want to wrap our hands around the merest 

gleam of silver, to use our body as both boulder
and lever until it comes loose in one smooth move.       
 
 


 

 

You know the story: a child pulls

off the legs of a spider or some 

other insect, one by one, then 

commands it to walk. In the end,

he concludes that without the means

to walk, one becomes deaf. Trail

of unmoving bodies on the windowsill:

after which the child loses interest 

or moves on to a new experiment

involving wings and melted tallow. 

I am not trying to say we are incapable 

of violence. I am not trying to say

we haven't had dreams in which 

our arms windmill until they find

a physical target, until the last

husk is surrendered as tax. Friends ask

how can you be so serene, listening

as an animal is slaughtered in the pit;

watching as blood pours from the slit

throat, as the knife scores the belly 

until the creamy white lining yields 

to inspection. Someone plunges 

an arm into the cavity to bring 

paired astrolabes to light: branched 

lungs, streaked kidneys. These

can be hung in the trees, like

dark beads of a chandelier.

The loop that held 
the chain. The coded

combination. The golden 
hoop that used to be 

one of a pair of earrings. 
The cup for a mis-matched 

saucer. The correct version 
of your given name. The heat,

the door to the furnace. 
The sign that you were seen. 

In the viewfinder the road with a stripe
down the middle leads to a red barn

against a very blue sky in the distance. 
The eye doctor clicks one lens after another

into place, and asks which combination
gives the clearest view of the scene.

While picking new lenses out of a tray,
she starts talking about her morning,

how in the middle of driving her two
daughters to school, one of them discovers

she's left her homework and binder at home
and pleads for her to turn around. Would

you do that, she asks me. Would you give 
in even after you've told them time

and again it's their responsibility
to make sure they have everything 

they need before we leave the house? 
I'm not sure how to reply. What if 

the kid gets points taken off and 
can't make it up with extra credit?

Instead I think of how I have gone back 
to bring my daughters what they've called

about, frantic or in panic in their need.
Have I been too soft, too sacrificing?  

The barn on the screen isn't really
red, but closer to brown. There aren't

any turns or four-way stops on the road,
no traffic lights, no geese or crossing 

deer to make the landscape even mildly 
interesting. Again, I read lines 

of letters diminishing in size, until 
I come to a row that looks like a trail
 
of evenly spaced ants. I want to say 
I've seen skies crosshatched with 

wheeling birds—a murmuration. Unlike 
the ancient Romans who thought the shapes 

they made were augurs from the gods, 
I can't predict what comes next  

or say with certainty how a moment 
connects to something that came before.   
 
 

Tell a story, says the writer giving
a lecture, about the first time you think

you might be falling in love. Remember 
the smallest details: the waft of tobacco 

from the neighbor's porch where he sits 
and reads all afternoon through evening, 

hidden behind a waterfall of pothos 
spilling from a hanging pot. Ceylon 

creeper, silver vine, also called 
devil's ivy because it is almost 

impossible to kill and it stays green 
even when kept in the dark. Remember

this and the rusted green of the garden
gate, the way your hand hesitated

before you rang the doorbell, waiting
to see if the boy that walked you home

would do something: push a strand
of hair away from your cheek, move

closer to brush his lips against it...
But nothing will happen here because you 

already know this is a town where 
everything gets broadcast to the four 

winds before it has even happened, 
a town where behind every window drape 

there is at least one pair of eyes
surveilling the immediate landscape.

Perhaps it is the way imminent action
gets suspended; perhaps it is because all

stories of beginning are full of awkward
silences and hesitation. More than the color 

of his eyes or hair or the texture of his 
smile, you'll recall more clearly the dark 

red spears of bandera española by the gate, 
its flowers thrust open in fulfillment.