Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The memory of doing is the memory 
       of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
       pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
       direction. I stack them and prepare 
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
       shaped like a smile into holes I've
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
       of the world can seem to soften; 
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
       linen thread. Someone filmed a rare 
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
       itself loose from its shell, 
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
       seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.
       

The wind speaks to trees.
Roads turn to rivers
and park benches drown.
We go about our lives
in this seaside town.

*

In the row of houses
by the university,
all week, a flurry:
sorority girls
strutting for TikToks.

*

They look unbothered
in their cowboy boots
and pink bodysuits.
They all hold their phones
aloft for selfies.

*

The tide was highest
on trash pickup day.
Imagine what floated
into the river—
or what will emerge.

*

We tried to recall
the times we fled town.
For sure, for Isabel.
We can't remember;
there were two others.

*

There's still milk and eggs
on grocery shelves.
This is still early—
the season is just
beginning. Days shorten.

*

Do we have Go Bags?
We talk about it.
Emergency status:
practically every
day, the heart thrashes.

 

 
is the logic of luck that everyone 
insists isn't (though it is) the same as

a message sent by angels. The paper plane 
flies in a dream fueled by fireflies, looking

for shadows of wings beneath the lake's 
glass surface; and when it finds them, 

it folds itself into a bud. We sink into that 
lake many times throughout the day, hiding 

from the heat of the sun or torrents of rain. 
How can we not believe it exists? Spines 

of trees curve toward their reflections
and are rewarded with increase. In this dream,

water is more than a tomb: more than need or
the history of all longings unmet under the moon. 

I was listening to a program on NPR
while I cleaned my office, then coiled a string 
of tiny winking bulbs attached to wire around 

the lamp on my desk. Because it's a hand-
me-down from one of my daughters, the plastic 
battery case is broken. I have to jiggle 

one of them loose to turn the thing off. 
On the radio, a Brazilian neuroscientist 
was talking about experiments that show, 

seemingly, how fish may experience pleasure 
and even seek it out. There are fish engaged 
in relationships of mutualism— "cleaner fish" 

like bluestreak wrasses remove blood-
sucking parasites from other fish, enhancing 
their clients' ability to survive while assuring 

themselves of food. But other fish, 
like the threadfin butterflyfish, come back 
for a cleaning even if they harbor no parasites. 

It's as if they might remember how it felt—
little tongues lighting up the white and
yellow chevrons down their backs. 
  
Meanwhile, the fairy lights flickered.
I could have discarded them, but there's 
something appealing in the idea 

of preserving small things that barely
warm the room, much less the corner. 
Perhaps I'm guilty of falling in love 

with meaning that harbors metaphor, 
in love with the promises language offers
though it might not guarantee their truth.

There's alwalys someone who asks questions
like What's your favorite dessert or Who 
is your favorite poet or Who was your most
well-behaved child? Once I read a story 
in which two families shared everything—
I mean literally. Not just a household 
but also their children, whose exact
parentage supposedly could not be known
or that they didn't care to know, since it 
was OK with them— Shared beds, shared 
partners, though not toothbrushes. 
The reasoning was love is not like a pie 
you can divide into parts, some larger 
or smaller, goopy with filling or with 
a flakier crust. It's just pie all the way 
through. Can you love what you don't know 
or what's yet to come as much as you 
can love what's been thrust into your hands? 
The implication might have to do with choice 
or some notion of relativity. Or it might be 
that you can't have a forest without trees; 
you can't say I love only this part of you, and 
only under certain conditions on certain days. 

A poet has assigned one letter of the alphabet
to each of 26 nucleotide triplets that form
the basic units of genetic code. ~ ZME Science




Seed the idea of a world 
in a cell— 
            Its blazons and beehives, 
its cascade of crystals, mangroves 
and mycelial threads. 
                      Not the summary 
of an event but the eidos of it. Imagine 
a generation of cranes 
                       rising from a plain 
after they have been forgotten; after they've 
become extinct. Don't we want 
                              to lure our dead
loves back from the swamps of oblivion? We
feed language into 
                   the undulating mechanism, 
to see how it might withstand extremity.




   


   

When we walk into the house, the storm door takes
a moment to shut itself.

Now I try to pay attention to where else there might be
small signs of resistance.

The bony side of my big toe chafes against the inside
of my leather shoe.  

Someone was telling me about a game developed by a 
mathematician, designed for the observation of how a seed
or cell evolves within a system.

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, 
as if by underpopulation.

Or reproduces and lives on to the next generation.
And so on.

When my daughter found out about dogwood berries,
she picked two from a tree we pass on the way 
to our favorite cafe.

My most elusive memory is of a field of white,
rippled and alive; and of my feet barely touching
the surface.

I always think I have time, until it proves me wrong.

We wait for the promised taste of custardy sweetness.

Some kinds of ripeness are needed by birds before
their long migrations.

 

The simple perfectness of a half moon floats into the sky near midnight.

It puts fog lights and the incandescence of street lamps to shame.

I have been reading about retrocausality, which physicists say 
is the possibility that future outcomes might reach backward
to shape conditions in the present.

There is a dress with a mustard yellow print I found in a drawer,
which I once imagined wearing to an indeterminate event.

If I unfold it from its tissue wrapper, put it on now 
then go out to dinner, will it be like the me today 
reaching back to the self that desired this years ago?

We are always thinking of time as a progression of increments
moving in one direction.

Sometimes I cannot seem to tell what day it is, but the smell
of burned toast means Monday. 

Or I become stuck in a memory, which is a moment built up of 
strings of ticking parts. 

I clipped a stalk of jasmine from a bush, but it did not die
even if it could have.

In the future, I am already setting its flowers in a vase.

On the sill, some nights, the water pulls the moon down
its smooth glass throat. 

Heat saturates
every aspect of this world.
If not heat, then cold.

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire 
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few 
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada. 

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

A thirty-four foot bronze statue 
of Neptune looks out over the oceanfront,
trident in one hand and loggerhead turtle
in the other. Two dolphins and an octopus
clamber up the statue's stone base. I know
there's more than one god of water, more 
than one god of fire and more than one 
story about the way this earth was created, 
which creature holds its core steady. Otherwise, 
the underworld is an idea too strange to fathom. 
Too difficult to think of how, when a wave recedes 
so far and so clean out to the horizon, it could 
return with such force to be an act of judgment.