Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Many winters, I lived
where there was no winter.
Instead I lived within 
cycles of heat and rain,

which had no names
other than what they were.
Scorched skin or flooded
skin. The mouths 

of downspouts always
open, never resting 
between begging for more
or begging for less.

The smallest diamond
of loss is still a loss—
whether in the sand, or to
the superfluity of water.

It is the year Mattel introduces Barbie's
new boyfriend, Ken; the year a Soviet
cosmonaut is the first human to cross into
outer space. I know that proximity and 
closeness are not the same, and there 
should be no reason for my parents to think 
Harper Lee's receipt of the Pulitzer for To Kill 
a Mockingbird the same year I come into the world 
augurs well for their child's career. Princess 
Diana was born two months before me. That same 
July, Ernest Hemingway, who wrote For Whom 
the Bell Tolls and once tried to walk into 
a spinning propeller, took his own life 
in Idaho. In a magical universe, there are 
no accidents. We already know we don't get 
to live forever. And yet, there are as many
times we stick to the plan as there are when 
we improvise or defer action. The launch 
attempt for the first orbital mission 
was postponed because of cloudy conditions. 
But it finally happened a month later, in '62. 
After a steak-and-eggs breakfast, John Glenn 
climbed into the Friendship 7. From space, 
he reported dust storms and flashes of lightning; 
earth's atmosphere a bright blue band, glowing 
particles he could only describe as fireflies.

Most of the time, we don't know 
the extent of what we can do until 
we do it. Until the hair wound around 
the throat of the instrument tightens 
and has no recourse but to break, 
until the sentries open the metal 
gates themselves to let in the rioting 
crowd. Someone says look at the trees
now afire with the songs of omen birds—
look at the light that slants across
house roofs and knights them as
cathedrals. Water and salt, rock
and clay— these are the things
that made us. We were there 
at the beginning and we will
be there until the end.

We forget the mystery we come from— 

Sheets of quartz and jade where mountain
deities live, their fingers touching

globes of fruit as they pass to make

them sweeter. Forest spirits in the trees, 
conversing late into the night, sometimes

moved to show their faces to the living

as if to remind us they continue to miss
this life. And why would they not? 

Appetite is fed by desire, and desire

by knowing the potency of need. 
And so we let them be. We ask 

their leave when we cross into

the shimmering field— it’s just
there, seemingly out of reach but

really, closer than we think. 

We sit   in spaces    the dark

      Clears for us       Breaking soft

tallow off tapers   As wind    tears through
  
              Our terraced   mountains

Avocado and guava    trees run     out

       Of ammunition      And moan

their    acquiescence     Whatever remains

               Unshredded     in the morning 

joins the new        day’s litany     a prayer
 
        To gods     who fall      asleep  

to the sounds       of their own         anger.
     

- after Linda Gregg


Let osprey return to river.
        Let avocets with their upturned bills.
Let diablotín masquerade as haunters 
               in the dark.
Let yellowlegs fish for ghost 
        crabs, and willets race along the shore. 
Let gannets weave their nests like aunts
               in widows' caps.
There is time yet and it is what we inhabit,
        whether it colors the sky purple 
or mends the broken crags with gold.
               Let the small grasses sleep
at the edge of the road and not fear
        the eye of the storm.

The clinic we go to was started 
decades ago by two doctors who recently 
passed away. But their children continue 
to run it, and most of the staff are 
Filipino. One of the nurses always 
recognizes my voice when I call. One 
asks for my opinion about schools when 
her son is applying for college. And another 
always begins to hum under her breath as soon 
as she rests her fingers on my wrists to take 
my pulse. The lab technician is so swift
and skilled: she knows exactly where 
to stick the needle for a blood draw.
The humming nurse comes back in with 
a paper robe. I start to undress when she 
leaves the room, but I can still hear some 
of the notes she repeats, drifting up 
and down and up and down the valley 
of some old tenderness or memory. 
  
 

To signal the start of the feast, 
the matriarch moves to the head of the table 
and hacks at the neck of the roasted pig
with the edge of her best porcelain plate. 
Why this is customary, no one remembers now. 
Like a priestess she continues down its glistening, 
caramel-colored back and the hot hiss released 
from beneath every square is a chorus of crisp
volcanoes. A child watches for anyone who might
choke on a bolus of cartilage so she can part 
their tresses for release. We are here 
with our long-held hungers, our dying 
for a taste. We go home with oily newspaper 
parcels, the ink of what has happened in the world
pooling into each morsel. Dizzy with pleasure,
we cannot tell when our mouths become raw,
and wake with the sensation of stampeding
beasts, released from the cage of our bodies. 

Little fruit flies waft through the kitchen
though there are only lemons in the fruit
bowl: their thick yellow rinds unscored, 
no actual perforation for tunneling into and 
out of fruit flesh. In the yard, the last 
of summer fruit has been sucked to pulp 
by helmeted beetles. The pits of peaches
and the seeds of bell peppers dry quietly
on squares of paper towel, but nothing 
hovers over them. Can you imagine armies
of insects advancing like a plague, 
carrying off babies and small animals?
But perhaps they will deposit them 
on forest perches or on the sleeves
of mountains, where summer rain and 
fern fronds will raise them until 
it's time for them to rejoin 
a world in need of remaking. 

There are people who can talk 
about their exes and how they've 
remained friends despite separation: 

amicable arrangements to co-parent; 
agreement that, with the admission of 
differences, there should be no need 

to escalate them to the scale of telenovela 
proportions. Amicabilis— a word used in Roman  
law to describe friendly and peacable relations, 

or the offer of relevant advice to a court 
so a ruling might be more favorable. If only 
it were simple to dress hurt in softer clothes,
 
take its hands in yours and convince it to stop 
picking at its scabs or installing more concertina 
wire across fence tops. Beyond the edge, that road

goes nowhere. Far away, a river murmurs old 
arguments to itself, resolving in a cascade before 
vaporing into foam. If only the underside of your 

blasted heart found a way to let some green grow again 
between the cracks, allow the blighted shingles to fall 
away into the quiet that surpasses all understanding.