Author: Luisa A. Igloria

What I see on the fence
is the sign Transient House—

But aren't all homes
temporary? It is no longer

connected to me or to mine,
by virtue of deed or sale

or transfer. Still, the contours
are familiar: the double arches

above the front windows, the eaves
and soffits; the east-facing porch

where my father used to sit in his
bathrobe in the mornings. Now, 

the front looks a little like 
a scrapyard, the tin mailbox

something a bird's heart might have
burst through. The shadow of old vines 

on the outer walls: whether herald or
lament, it's hard to tell the difference.

Though caffeine has a diuretic effect, I drink it
throughout the day.

It does not seem to make much difference if I drink
coffee at midnight; I am sleepy no matter what.

But when I slip into bed, thoughts race
in my head, jolting me awake.  

I will try to write in declarative sentences,
in defiance of all that merely masquerades as true.

Five earthquakes were recorded in different 
Philippine cities over the last twenty-four hours.

A plume of hot steam rose nine hundred feet 
into the air above Taal volcano. 

More than landscape changes
in the aftermath of extremity. 

There is sorrow in the aftermath; there is
also anticipatory grief.

In 1990, after earthquakes nearly leveled my city,
a telecom company set up emergency hotlines.

People lined up to call someone— anyone—
to let them know.

Father died. Grandmother died. The house 
collapsed. A bus lay at the bottom of the ravine.

There was water in the lake. The grocer handed out
bread and cans of beans through a hole in the wall.

The children were afraid
to take off their shoes at night.

~ Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile


Scientists have found a tiny microbe
      which isn't a virus, yet acts like one
because it seemingly has only one purpose: 
      to make more copies of itself by stealing 
what it needs from its host. A picture
      on a slide looks like delicate 
embroidery— peach-colored French knots 
      inside a sac of gauze. Its name points 
to the marvelous, to the kind of mystery reserved
      for gods and ancient fossils. Scientists   
say it straddles the line between life and not-
      life— which is not the same as saying everyone 
who doesn't look like us or talk like us is a kind of 
      non-life, which then might make it possible 
to round them up like animals and pack them off 
      to Uzbekistan or Eswatini. What do labels  
even mean— legal, illegal, alien, documented— if  
      life on earth had to begin somewhere and in all
likelihood we have one universal common ancestor. 

I am amazed by the story where a man pulls 
two ships weighing over a thousand pounds 
across the water and to the shore. Granted,

the distance is only fifteen meters and not
the length of the Suez Canal— but not a single
tooth bursts from his mouth. He backs away

from the edge of the pier, hands rowing  
air on both sides of his body as the ropes
gradually give up their slack. He’s done

other hard things like this before: pulled
a train thirty-three feet across the rails
also with his teeth, and twenty cars

with a harness strapped to his back. 
Besides the weight, do the ships, trains, 
and cars have symbolic value, does he

do this for a reason other than to break
a world record? I'm also in awe when I
hear of grandmothers forming patrols 

on the periphery of schools, of random
strangers rushing to the aid of humans
pulled out from behind counters

as they flip burgers and fill orders
for soda and fries. I want to hear about
happy endings where the trickster 

rabbit outwits fox and greedy wolf, where
the spider weaves threads and carries cruise
ship workers across the ocean to safety.

~ after Hieronymus Bosch


This world near the end of the world
is meat-grinder, is bridge buckling 

under the weight of souls impaled,
or in the throes of their would-be 

undoing. This world is bodies astride
blades and bowing beneath the hull 

of some idol's cast-off shoe, is beasts
and demons shooting swords or flames from 

their mouths. In the distance, lakes black
as tar; the clang of instruments for binding

and shattering. The harp of the world 
is strung to the point of breaking. 

What hope there might be is a small 
bubble, a spacecraft with limited seating.  

Modest but insistent, diminutive 
but intermittently loud— you dislike 

anything that chafes against your
contours, dares to wrap a narrow

box of leather around the front
of the foot. When pressed too long

throughout the day, you flush red
alarms that travel through all

the body's highways. Flip-flops
or open-toe cut-out sandals are 

probably best as footwear, though
they might be conspicuous in a crowd 

of the mostly slender and well-heeled.
Oh but you are a knob of marble splayed 

with veins, quarried from those distant 
hills where peasants trek the muddy trails 

unshod. A bead, carved from the bones of granary 
gods crouched near house posts and wire coops

where roosters crow, flash their black and
orange feathers and brandish their spurs. 

There are some options
       for dealing with long silence.
Build your own version,

or take life into your arms
as if it were prodigal.

At its fullest point, the moon is so grand 
in the sky: a giant mango bursting from 
ripeness, everyone can't help but look 
at it and salivate. Maybe it's all a matter of
scale, or whatever it is you eat that morning— 
dried fish and rice? butter and jam? A girl
shrinks until she fits into a door the size 
of a mouse hole, or she'll grow until her head 
butts against the ceiling. When a writer 
rises to speak onstage, she removes 
her blazer and we see her bronzed arms 
and back muscles, shown off to advantage 
by the spaghetti strap maxi she's wearing. 
With the spotlights full on your face, everyone 
in the audience sees you but you can't see their 
expressions: are they crying or laughing, bored 
or breaking out into wild applause? Sometimes 
it's good to not know everything. It's enough 
to imagine the stories that go on without you— 
you don't have to pretend to understand them 
or live them out until the very end.

How do they do it, people who talk
rapid-fire without stumbling, turning

(they say) even their own painful 
vulnerability into delightful repartee, 

moments of public embarrassment into 
charming sentences on the page or 

as speech bubbles? You fumble so much 
sometimes, your awkwardness inflates into

seeming oversincerity into false step after 
false step while your mind calculates what it 

might cost this time— Strange, this reluctance 
to confess your simple hungers, the same ones 

everyone has shared from the first moment they 
came, bawling, mucus-spattered, into the world.

—by which we mean something 
we thought impossible, unreeling 

before our eyes. The days too bright, 
the nights either too quiet or 

exploding with earthquake debris 
and the bombast of helicopter

raids. Parents and children torn 
from each others' arms. Then

they disappear. How many times 
do you read the word torture

in the news? Don't say this is
just the way history plays out. 

Don't say the pendulum swings 
hard but it's not done. Don't  

say you can find other words 
to excuse this or make it clean.