Author: Luisa A. Igloria

~ Maguindanao


The last time I read of a backhoe 
in the news, it was used to bury 
bodies in mass graves. They were 
journalists and wives and sisters
of small-town politicians, walking 
together for safety in order to cast 
their votes. In that town, the man 
who wanted to be king (or the equivalent 
of king) ordered their massacre. He wanted 
to send a message. Though the world took 
notice, it was too late for the victims. 
When I see "backhoe" in the news today, 
no layer of concrete, whether torn down 
or re-laid, can erase the vision of
mutilated bodies in the earth;
of a would-be king watching 
unmoved from his tower.

The hills are flocked
like velvet. Birds drowse
in the shallows near the bridge
from which people toss candy
wrappers, crushed cans of soda.

A tiny floating house
made for the ducks by 
a professor at the college
one whimsical year is still
tethered to the wooden pile.
 
How unchanged the world looks 
in these kinds of circumstance. 
Though it's tipped, no one seems 
to register the shift. Acorns pinging 
onto the surface hardly break the silence.  

Calcium absorbs more radiation, 
rendering the bones chalk-white. 
Soft tissues admit less, and show

as gray. Beneath the pale ceiling  
of the pelvis, slim pillars lengthen
down the leg. Imagine an orchard

outside— the moon rising to limn
persimmons with one more layer 
of gold. Consider the other 

trees giving up their leaves
for beaten copper, and the cry 
of a loon limping across water

as if toward a beacon. White,
green, red. And then the soft
furl of darkness afterwards. 

~ Antirrhinum

Flax flower, dog flower with a maw
gaping under the weight of a bee
or pressure from fingers— 

Is the soul really stronger 
than it believes 
itself to be? 

So many filaments
in the canopy, tugged 
by an unseen force. 

Where the sun begins
to disappear from the world,
the light is briefly gold.

I too have opened 
my mouth even when
it was not asked.

Those years I couldn't swallow
anything with the skin or stench

of a fowl, with the fur of fruit, 
with a salt-shell or pod. The juice 

of tomatoes wrecked the lining of my gut, 
the flush of their cheeks stippled a flat 

tattoo on my calves. The first time I met
the ghost of my own mortality, I cried into 

its knitted shawl. I know it was only 
practicing how to reconcile with itself, 

but my shaking has never stopped. Nor 
has my need to dress my sharpest fears

in finery while opening the door to lion and
lamb, letting them both sit and eat at my table. 

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.