Author: Luisa A. Igloria

There are days when you get 
some good traction and the load 
you push, though it hasn't gotten 
lighter, slides forward. But 
there are other days when
the stone doesn't budge. 
You make a notch in the earth 
with your shoe or find some other 
way to prop it up for a while, 
so you can nap or go eat 
chocolate-covered popcorn
and get your fingers sticky,
which means you'll have to wash up
at the sink, by which time you realize 
what you actually want to do is take 
a long, hot shower, use the bar of 
jasmine soap you were saving for some 
forgotten reason. Just a little 
time to breathe without bracing
for the next thing to drop,
for the next addition to the weight
you never saw coming. You know
relief can come in the in-between,
uneven spaces, some mercy small
as a smile or a touch of a hand.
Though the weight hasn't grown lighter 
you are trying to understand how it 
doesn't necessarily mean you have failed 
at the carrying, that your life isn't 
just the color and shape of this stone.

I've been told to stop apologizing
for things over which no one has 

any control. And yet, all these years,
I still can't stop saying I'm sorry

for the circumstances that made  
the distances I thought we were 

trying in our own way to bridge 
now seem insurmountable. To say

I no longer want to have anything
to do with you is a choice, just as

it is to say I would not close that 
door completely. Every day, I fan 

my wishes out like cards on the table. 
That wherever you are, mornings 

are gentle and the winds warm; that you 
understand your name could never be 

spoken in anger. That remembrance 
walks behind us quietly, but following.

The main character in a Dutch
movie announces to everyone: 

this is the day she is going 
to die. She lies down in her own  

bed without a fuss, untroubled, 
certain of what will happen.

Perhaps she is done with all
the negotiations, all the upkeep

that life requires of her— done
with farming and raising children,

done with chasing and refusing
sex, patching up quarrels, standing

up to injustice, stretching a pay-
check, bulking up a meal. Done

too with the Sunday suppers in 
the garden, the long, earnest 

conversations with friends deep 
into the night. But how did she know, 

how does anyone know? It's not like you're 
given a ticket or schedule, a station or 

terminal. It's not like a clock on the mantel 
that you can hear winding down. But some insist 

you will know when it's time— perhaps 
when the floating world grows even more 

transparent, every bubble brightening 
imperceptibly just as it starts to dissolve. 

A thousand meters deep
     in the zone called mesopelagic, 
a lanternfish lifts its tiny row
     of photophores, offering to slip it 
into the ocean's voluminous sleeves. 
     Nightly it rises toward the surface
to feed on plankton. By itself,
     its gleam is a sliver. But millions
of them shimmer the water with
     tinfoil. Their light is endogenous—
meaning they produce it with their own
     bodies. What an astonishment: to find 
inside of us two sticks or flint and steel, 
     what it might take to start a flame. 

Not yet erased from a stone  
slab in the yard: a single 

footprint of an animal, visible 
in the almost dark just as snow 

has started to fall. Was it lame 
or hurt, or bounding away from 

some pursuer? We too move through 
this uncertain space that every 

day feels more abandoned by light. 
But somehow our bodies carry us in

the dark, and we stretch our arms 
forward, feeling for the shape 

of something solid or a hand to pull 
us in the right direction toward 

home. Isn't that what we all want? 
If stingless honeybees in the rain-

forests of the Amazon have been granted
the legal right to exist and thrive 

and be legally represented when harmed
or threatened, why should our breaths

and voices not rise above a hum or leap
toward sounds that call to us in welcome?

Nineteen pairs of eyes train
themselves on the front of the room,
perhaps on me, perhaps on an interesting
spot on the whiteboard. We are doing 
close reading, and already I see some  
slumped slightly in their chairs or leaning
toward the end of the hour. They want to know 
what it is exactly they should know to pass
this course, what it is exactly I am
supposed to want from them. These days
the world is always using words like
faster, more efficient, and optimize—
as if the mind were a flat rate box
stuffed with content on an assembly 
line, then taped and pushed down 
a chute. I long for those times we
lingered over the pages of a favorite 
book read more than once, for mornings 
unspooling toward afternoon and evening 
along with sentences so brilliant, I 
couldn't get them out of my head.

In the tissue-lined channels of my body, 
the cells of my children drift like lanterns.
They flicker with messages encoded long ago,
carrying bits of story that remain on this
side of the water. Outside, they row
in the wind through their own cartography,
sometimes returing to the port of their first
origins. Sometimes I am the lighthouse keeper,
and sometimes I am my own vessel, trying
like them to breach treacherous depths
to reach a calmer sea. Across the years
and all this distance, I want to believe
there is still a quiet hum of signals at 
cellular level, and that as long as they 
are there, none of us could ever be lost.

The child sleeps 
in his father's arms
still wearing the clothes 
he was taken in. We pray 

he can still dream 
of bread and the soft 
pillow on his own bed, 
at home where someone 

is trying to stitch 
their fears into 
marigolds and leaves. 
We try to gather our

courage into kindling: 
speaking and naming, 
watching and witnessing. 
We know we can hold

silence and words in 
the same hand, that knees 
can sing on the hard 
streets packed 

with snow. The child 
sleeps with his mouth open. 
Look at that kind of trust 
his body still has.

Days of freezing cold, nights
listening to sleet scratch vertical
dashes on the roof and windowpanes. 
And yet, besides the tiny icicles
that hang from the limbs of the fig
tree, you've seen packed green nubs
that will purple into fruit in summer.
For now, every edge gleams sharp
as the grief of the mother scouring
the earth for the daughter taken into 
the underworld. But even now, the light 
is already changing. The hard, 
packed earth softens after thaw.

In faded photographs you don't have 
but still clearly remember, everyone 
is facing straight at the camera but not 
smiling: uneasy truce after noisy
quarrels behind closed doors, lips 
drawn tight as the secrets they took 
with them into the grave. You can smell 
the must of the grandmother's lace mantilla, 
the wool of the father's coat. You can see 
the carefully filed points of the mother's 
nails, the veins that were starting to show 
on her hands. Each of them could have been 
a key to a row of doors, each of them 
could have been a yellowed note slipped 
into a secret pocket or the inside of a hem.   
They've left, but now and again they appear
in dreams, in the sudden craving for a taste
from another time, in the lines of an old 
song whose refrain seems familiar
though it was all before your time.