Author: Luisa A. Igloria

1

To everyone, she was Little
Mother, mother’s younger sister;

sometime shelter, confidant, friend—
The maids in neighbors’ houses, especially,

shyly came to ask for her advice:
deboning fish, preserving fruit,

extracting savor from crushed heads
of shrimp. To all, she gave unstinting

service in her prime: from dawn to dusk,
the only acolyte at kitchen sink and stove;

red-knuckled hand that scrubbed soiled linens,
that cut our morning bread. I never knew

her secrets or her true desires.
Though clearly, having had me young

then given me up years before she had
three others, her heart could not

have been immune. One afternoon, while
in her care after school in kindergarten,

she put away the laundry and took my hand,
saying we would walk to the plaza and have

lunch at a Chinese restaurant. She put
her finger on my lips, and her lips said

Don’t tell. The rest is a blur
of noise and oily smells. And then I was too

involved with strands of slippery
noodles in my bowl to notice anything else

about the man who sat next to her at our table,
only that she could not keep her eyes from his.

In response to Via Negativa: Hermetic.

rigged with twine that broke when the boat

capsized and the stone of my arrival sank
into the murk beneath the waves, I become

more of what you are most convinced
I am— There, swallowed by a giant fish

which spits me up after months of servitude
and tedium spent scouring its insides

until they glow like powder rooms
in expensive hotels, wallpaper

the shade of pink Himalayan salt.
My ears, by your reckoning,

have curled sufficiently inward
to indicate that I have learned

the lessons of constant chastening.
Now I can be given papers, a name

that can fit into a mouth, picked out
of a great book sitting on the podium

of the landing station. The answer
to the complex problem that I present

is better arrived at, in your opinion,
if I write of rice fields bordered

by ruins, or of women smoking dark
rings at dusk in beer gardens,

while soldiers patrol the periphery. You like
the postcard of the explorer in dungarees,

grinning broadly for the camera as he fondles
the breasts of native women flanking him

on each side. You think the answer to the problem
is a story thick with the porridge of suffering,

the better somehow, for us who’ve eaten of it
daily to aspire to nobility— The answer

to the problem is not the sorrow of children
diving naked into the sea for the prize

of a single black pearl, but those depths
which will embrace us all, indiscriminately.

In response to Via Negativa: Troubled.

don’t worry; don’t be so offended,
don’t take it all so personally.

You’re only misguided. If you don’t take it
all so personally, you’ll probably be the next
flavor of the month. So would you come

out and give the keynote at our next
ethnic heritage program? Your language
is so lush and lovely though I confess

I don’t always understand what you’re
trying to say. Don’t take offense, I mean it
only in the best way. And I know, it must be

because English isn’t your first language,
isn’t it? Why don’t you ever write in your
own language? It just sounds so beautiful.

I hear all kinds of sounds: lost rivers,
orphaned birds, the gentle bump of coconuts
landing on the sand. And your people! So

very industrious, always working hard,
so unassuming; always, always smiling, never
out of place. Does your name mean anything?

How do you spell that? Why do you insist
on carrying that sense of burden all the time?
Life, you know, doesn’t have to be so hard.

In response to They Pretend to be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist.

Where dump trucks take
our trash, most of us

don’t know: an open pit,
a landfill, flotilla

of dark wings waiting
to tear into the reek.

Salt spray from the sea
cannot temper the stench

of human waste: the wind
slashes each plastic bag

and its contents, bursts
inner tubes and remnants

of coats. Everything has
a hidden seam— The children

who live there find five
mangled spoons, short of

a set; the carcass of a dented
thimble, an animal that once

was turned on a spit—
green, with lunar cast.

In response to Via Negativa: Gentrification.