Author: Luisa A. Igloria

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.

Philippines


Those were years of darkness and silence
when we learned not to trust anything, 

not even our shadows because they change 
depending on the time of day. The man 

in the clean, pressed shirt who sat 
next to you in the jeepney, the teacher 

who always had the latest hairstyle; 
the auntie who sold rice and swamp spinach 

at the corner, the man who ladled hot 
crisped corn into paper sacks at the edge 

of the school yard— our elders said we 
couldn't trust anyone. Everyone was afraid, 

because everyone could be bribed   
or threatened or bought. We spoke 

with our eyes or through the lean of our 
bodies, taught each other codes for knocking 

that meant friend or relative and not 
foe. When the curfew sounded at nine, 

we sat together with shades drawn, turned 
down the volume on our radios. They seemed

to age before their time, but we helped 
our children with homework and told them 

to say their prayers before going to bed. 
When we put their pencils and crayons away, 

the sight of a brightly drawn yellow sun on
kraft paper was enough to rend our hearts. 

You show up late to a wedding
reception, missing not only the Chicken
Dance and all the versions of the Electric 
Slide, but also the moment when the bride
and groom cut the cake and try to cram
the largest morsel into each others' 
mouths. All the slices have been served; 
only a few mangled pieces are left, thick
with buttercream and too little cake.
You think about your youth, that sequence
of finish school early, marry early, 
for fear of missing the train called 
adulthood. Should you have waited, gone 
to more parties, hung out with the shinier
and more ambitious crowd, focused on those 
with one eye on real estate and the other 
on trading futures? Now, approaching
the later threshold of life, you take
stock of what you have and what you 
can leave behind; some kind of bequest 
or legacy. Have you told your daughters 
your most important stories, what they 
should do with all these books and all 
the trinkets you saved from your other 
lives? You've never had a financial 
adviser but now you're standing in
the lobby of his building, about to take 
the elevator up to your appointment. Perhaps 
this means something in you still believes
in the future, something now willing
to join the game of risk and gain.

Sometimes it is small 
as a moth folded in the hollow

of my chest. Sometimes it circles
my wrists and ladders up my spine,

then takes hold of my shoulders 
to twist them into ache. Sometimes 

it has the heft of stone and I 
no longer remember when exactly  

it grew more weighted, or when 
I thought the body could make a little 

more room for what it can't actually hold. 
Though I want to forget, it shapeshifts. 

My only hope is that in staying and not 
simply passing through, it becomes 

the kind of root which remembers 
it can grow into something green.  

A salt lick, a watering hole, a thumbprint 
embossed on a clearing in the dusty hills. How 
did it become this fantasy of paradise, willows
weeping with the weight of untrimmed blooms 
as flat-bottomed boats circle the surface of 
a manmade lake? At first, only a handful 
of them. And then, more tourists clamoring for 
a turn. Now there are too many concessions, 
crowding the water that merely flows around 
and around itself. Concession, from the Latin
con + cedere: the grant of privilege by 
a government to individuals to engage 
in some enterprise. Or, the act of allowing 
or conceding. Who gave the first permission? 
They fight among themselves for the right
to the largest fleet. They name ghosts on 
business permits as their children intermarry. 
They forget the history of ruin, how the most 
accurate ledger is the one kept by rain.

Have you ever wanted to be more 
seen but at the same time blend 
into the background, a shadow 
capable of erasing itself until all 
that's left is a bioluminescent outline, 
mercurial tentacles flashing in and out 
of the depths? I've learned about things 
like camouflage, hiding in plain sight 
while carrying a bright orange lantern 
in a transparent bell. You'd think darkness 
itself was passing through me. But it's 
ammonium that fills my body cavity, lighter 
and more buoyant than seawater. Threatened, 
I retreat: pulling my head and arms into 
my own cloud cover, changing into an enigma 
the ocean still can't figure out. Does it 
pay off to be my own galaxy, sometimes 
discoverable and sometimes not?

The moon suspends itself above our cities, 

its seas a romance whose mystery we haven't 

plumbed entirely though we've sent men 

to leave marks on its deserts, footprints 

in its hills of fine lunar dust. We are always 

trying to bridge the distance between earth and

heaven, climb out of the nave where we bow

our heads like congregants in supplication.

When we look up, it is toward the apex 

of the vault and beyond. Cai Guo-Qiang 

built a sixteen hundred forty foot-long Sky 

Ladder, wire brushed with fireworks and

gunpowder, held aloft by a helium balloon. 

One June dawn at Huiyu Island Harbor, he lit 

and watched it blaze, rung by gold rung against

the still indigo sky. Shrimp boats, trawlers,

and skiffs paused where they were. Villagers

emptying their chamberpots caught their breath. 

It took only a little  over two minutes, but 

in that space, the impossible happened. 

The universe glowed, opening 

the door to every desire.

Those slow afternoons, she'd lie 
on the couch and rest her head on its arm, 

then gesture for me to come pluck out the white 
hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. 

Five centavos for each, she winked. Perhaps 
I earned twenty-five. Her hair, still thick 

and glint-dark then as a tidal pool. 
Sheened with a slick of coconut oil,

it needed no other adornment. But
she tried out trends— pixie cuts, 

kiss-me curls. Now I'm the same age she was 
when she began tinting her hair with henna, 

as the shoreline above her forehead slowly 
receded. I touch the scalloped curve 

on a barette, the crosshatched tuft from 
my own hairbrush, look in the mirror 

at the part resembling a trail as the moon 
raises its tortoiseshell comb into the sky.