Author: Luisa A. Igloria

How hard can it be to suffer
together with another? A woman
in her dotage becomes the mother-

in-law she used to loathe, the one
who grasped at every opportunity
to sabotage her marriage and yet

had no recourse but call out to her,
night after night as she lay in bed
with a broken hip, having to be turned

to keep the boils from forming. Now
she presses the thin curved spoon
of her back to the mattress and opens

her mouth, sends the wraith of her voice
through cracks in the walls in search
of someone who’ll suffer with her.

In response to Via Negativa: Too rich.

Because it was raining and visibility
was poor and the backsplash from passing
cars made it seem personal even when
it wasn’t, the rolling stretches
of meadow don’t offer their usual
assurances of beauty, of never-ending
something beginning with wings
and concluding at the horizon, clichés
we have been taught to break up
with the blur of the unexpected—
As in that famous painting of the woman
and child waist-deep in the grass walking,
a long way off from where they’ve come,
a long way still from where they’re going,
the vivid poppies urging them along
like flames; the open blue parasol
a lopsided cloud trailing behind
on a string, not quite out of air.

When did you first become aware
of their benign neglect, their

terrible, grandiose omnipotence
at your expense? Was it your own

father making jokes about how women
are generally not to be trusted

because they have two mouths;
or at a reception table where the only

man seated there (a scientist)
did not deign to make conversation

with the wives and mothers at one end?
Was it the senator who claimed he

was only joking when he dismissed
single mothers for having been knocked up?

Was it the podiatrist who decided
to slice off half your toe-

nail without prior consultation, to solve
the smaller issue of the ingrown part?

You limped away from that and other injurious
encounters feeling unseen, unsettled, unwomaned,

undone; vowing that next time, you’d open your mouth
to show your protest, your disgust, your rage.

I have these numbers—
I call every day but
no one picks up the phone

I don’t actually know
if it rings, how it rings,
in the rooms of the house

that I call or why
the people living there
won’t answer

I imagine the rings
echoing like ripples
along a corridor,

searching for
an alcove or an ear
to bump up against—

for the line
to reach its destination
for a voice to answer

In response to Via Negativa: Pilgrim's Progress.

We were taught to open
parasols when we walked
in the sun, and suffered

long sleeves in ninety-
degree heat. We never learned
about SPF sunscreen, but one year

the biggest trend was kaolin-
based medicinal creams. The fairest
girls were crowned school queens.

Can you see the rest of us, dark
as farmers’ daughters, throwing flowers
at floats passing us in the streets?

I can feel the storm coming,
a system the weather reports warn

will move through the area
between midnight and early morning.

My restlessness is lit by the smell
of chemicals in the air, offset

by the sound of something kindled
as if on the other side of the world.

How do crops hold up their heads
to a battery of rain? I dream of swollen

star-apples, ruddy santol, Spanish
plums dipped in salt. By the fence,

wild berries scribble tiny hearts
along the ground. A thud in the eaves

could be the sound of flight
interrupted, a body reorienting

to the map. I pray to the heavenly ox,
to the clouds that bolt the axles

of the cart to the shaft— if it
should finally want to go, let the end

be swift. Let it come easy in sleep,
in her own bed, at the end of the day.

In response to Via Negativa: Night World.

It’s difficult to practice for
the unseen, prepare for the unknown.
Meanwhile, dandelions release

their small planet load of white-
tendriled paratroopers; chickweed,
purslane, yellow oxalis creep

along the fence. Some nights,
humid, sulphurous smells come in
from the beach. Some days, we turn away

persistent salesmen from our doors.
We warn the neighbors. We plant
ourselves across the threshold.

In response to Via Negativa: Grind.

“When we received the cable from Admiral Dewey telling of the taking of the Philippines I looked up their location on the globe. I could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles!” ~ President William McKinley to H.H. Kohlsaat, Editor of the Chicago-Times Herald

I’m looking at captions of old
newspaper photos from April 1898,

just before The Battle of Manila Bay—
all the language already in place,

as if to make the outcome so: War
in the Orient! American Squadron

Will Capture Philippine Islands and
American Warships Will Fight Spanish

Squadron Near Manila; A Very Desperate
Encounter is Predicted. And the fleet

of Spanish vessels goes down in flames
or sinks into the bay: the Reina Cristina

and Castilla, the gunboats Don Antonio
de Ulloa, Don Juan de Austria, Isla de Luzon,

Isla de Cuba, Velasco, Argos— while
on the American side, the Olympia plays

“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “El Capitan”
as sailors on the Baltimore, Raleigh and Boston,

the gunboats Concord and Petrel, the revenue
cutter McCulloch, and the transport ships Zafiro

and Nanshan shout “Remember the Maine!”
Admiral Dewey issues strict orders that “no

barbarous or inhuman acts are to be perpetrated
by the insurgents,” by which he means Filipinos.

Artist prints and photographs show no native casualties
of war, no native involvement— except that skirmish

cost the Spanish a 20 million dollar fine: the price
of handing over their former colony and its inhabitants

to the Americans. Who doesn’t love a good war? When news of Dewey’s
victory reaches the mainland, Americans cheer. What does it matter

that most didn’t know what and where the Philippines are,
as long as those darned islands are now the spoils of war?

Push back against the hands
arranging the conditions

for movement (meaning barely any),
the narrow confines of a cell

stripped down to minimum
furnishings: cot with creaky

springs, mattress streaked
with sepia stains, cracked

washbowl in the corner. Kick
and scream when they send

the trumped-up summons,
as outside, someone prepares

the spit and starts the fire.
Recall every subterfuge and tactic

for stalling, every scanned
memory of some kind of hinge

or chink in the armor. Yes
your stamina can go beyond

a thousand and one nights. You
can also drive the tip of any sharp

point at hand into the first
blur that hesitates or wavers.