Author: Luisa A. Igloria

  
We are tired, I am tired. Every day
is exhausting, isn't it? I'm thankful
for anyone and everyone who's fighting 
mightily for our shared rights— to food 
and clean water and air, the fair 
reward of our labor, homes 
whose floors we'll sweep, where we 
can go to bed and rest with no fear 
at night. What need have we of a future 
that bristles with new hardships but old 
hate? I want the trees to just be trees 
with no history of bodies dangling 
from them like bloated fruit. Marcus 
Aurelius said Never let the future 
disturb you. You will meet it, if you 
have to with the same weapons of reason 
which today arm you against the present. 
I've heard my neighbor say she has a gun; 
I wonder if she considers that an extension 
of reason. The Stoics practiced the virtues 
of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation— 
they claimed these gave them the discipline 
to endure both pleasure and pain, but 
especially pain. I admit I've always 
had trouble reconciling that kind 
of indifference: as if it were a simple 
matter to vacate the personal, to keep 
my back straight and look evil in the eye 
without revealing how I tremble inside. 
I read and listen so I might be wise;
and strive to be fair. But I know my heart
can also expand, transmit its joys 
like a sun or a moon. Or howl, 
as animals do of their suffering.    

Years later, she remembered how inconsolably
the baby cried, how nothing could soothe except 

bouncing the mattress nonstop. She'd lock
both of them in the room, away from others

disturbed by the wail of misfortune issuing
out of the mouth of one so young. But was it
  
indeed misfortune? What of a life might have
pointed to its development, when the sound 

of a window opening or closing was not even 
a thing of portent? What is it we mean when

we say May you have a good life? Not that agony
might never visit your door, nor the wish you 

might never know the pain of monumental loss.  
Perhaps, only that you might live, despite.

Once, as I explained 
the difference between
tercets and triplets 
(three lines that rhyme),
a student shared that she 
was one of triplets. I joked, 
Which one of you is here? I think
it might not have landed; I'm not 
really very good at humor, though 
sometimes a thought or a word
comes to me that seems amusing. 
It's all in the timing, say some 
friends. I may not be very good 
at that either. I hope you 
won't take it against me. 

Yeah why not. Let's go somewhere in a dark 
automobile at the speed of dreaming, purpose 

or no purpose. Sometimes, like now, I get 
tired of pondering the sustainability 

of survival as a kind of heroism. How long 
did you say it took the Praetorian guards 

to deliver the heads of their tyrant masters? 
There are sons described as having faces

only their mothers could love, yet their mothers
(and even sisters) come forward to testify about 

the cruelty of these men. Can you imagine how 
that kind of rejection must drive them crazy, 

behind their mask of stony indifference? The world 
is no more theirs than anyone else's. Their kind 

of darkness, small and mean and selfish, is not even 
anything compared to that more elemental darkness which, 

it is said, precedes the time before the subjugated world 
tears off its blinders, so the pendulum can arc to another end.     

 

The stump of a tree cut down years ago, finally 
softened, has become host to mycelia

Sometimes the smell of grilled meat floats over these houses

On the news tonight, hundreds of dairy cows infected with avian flu

My eye doctor tells me the names of chickens she keeps— 
Betsy, Trixie, Daisy; one shares the name of one 
of my daughters

Mornings, just before my husband wakes me, I lose the thread of 
a dream

One weekend we buy a tub of pork blood; I wonder why the label 
is pork blood instead of pig blood but we will make
a traditional stew

I like "very hard" crosswords; they have interesting 
words like abscissa

When I slap a mosquito sucking on the skin of my shoulder, I wonder 
if the blood is mine or someone else's

We're all part of the same cellular network  

It is the year of the snake and some have taken power 
that isn't theirs  
  
Every spore, every bloodstained stone, every word we protect 
and won't give surender

Look at the moths that arrow night after night 
into basins of uncollected light 

Dear intermittent constriction beneath the left
side of my ribcage, sometimes you feel bird-
like, and sometimes like a fish in a transparent 
bowl. Sometimes you have the gloss of a ripe 
summer cherry. Sometimes I detect a rough
orange flash, a fin flailing without direction, 
a poorly painted sunset over a broken reef.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd ever have 
the courage to put you under— pull 
the drapes, slide you into an envelope 
and send it away with no return address. 
But at the same time, I don't know 
where to send you, or what I'd do 
in the silence you'd leave behind. 
     

       Think back to the day you received the phone 
call when ___ was brought to the hospital. What 
       was the color of the sky before that moment
and then immediately after? Where did the smell
       of smoke come from and why couldn't you  
get rid of it for days? And think back a season 
       before, when snow had not yet covered 
the ground: the hinge of the box was folded 
       shut; its cadre of shapeshifting griefs 
still lay inside, either quietly or harnessed 
       to unknown purposes. You must try hard 
to remember in any aftermath, even these 
       once had bones wanting to become flesh, 
wanting to be named, called to, forgiven.

The interviewer asked: if you could, 
would you do it, what one thing would it be
that you might change? This is never a fair 
question, because of course you know you can't. 

You won't ever fit again into that size 8 
sheath dress, so give it away. You won't 
have gone into that other degree program; 
you won't have managed to avert one 

stupid decision or another. A thought 
experiment is only as good as the score 
you expect to get after the exam; and 
as you've come to know, expectation 

is a false prophet, a bad tarot card 
reader who can't tell a cup from a can 
of soup or a fool from his shadow. 
Everywhere, someone wants a new 

beginning. And everywhere, someone 
wants something to end. In Long Island, 
a hundred thousand ducks were recently 
euthanized because of avian flu. Red-

breasted and common mergansers are washing up 
dead on Lake Michigan shores. How do you rewind 
to the particular moment before the needle went
haywire, before plagues were incredible stories

from a different century? You tell her you wouldn't
change a thing, though looking at what you've already
lived through from where you are now, it's like you 
get to feel it all: all over again, a second time.

      Will it always be like this? her daughters ask
in the throes of a visitation from their own despair.
      She doesn't feel like she's lying when she says no—  
didn't Heraclitus say all things pass and nothing stays?

     "A visitation" sounds like a fleeting thing, though  
like bad news it might land with a thud on the roof.
     Heraclitus said all things pass and nothing stays— 
they swirl with the current and the current flows.

     The world's bad news lands with a thud on the roof—
black-suited company of crows, shadows warping the view.
     They swirl with the current and the current flows. 
What does the moon portend? Do stars bristle with knives?

     Morbid company, drab-suited couriers of the shadowy  
view: don't you tire of their gloomy spreadsheets?    
     The moon rises in the sky and stars speckle with light. 
Their river's dark indigo. They don't stay still either.

     She wants to shred and ball up these sheets of gloom;
she's not lying. Nothing might stop, but we won't stop.    
     The sky's dark indigo river goes on and on—
Why should anything always be the way it is?   

There's a difference between saying
Bahala na— Leave it up to fate— and
Bahala na si Darna— village girl turned
Wonder-Woman-type avenger.

Bahala na— Leave it up to fate— can mean
crumble in the corner like a stick of chalk.
Or you could swallow your fear, turn avenger.
Moonlight reveals monsters in every tree:

they want you to crumble like chalk in the corner;
they want you to believe nothing can ever be safe.
Yes, monsters are about, no longer just in moonlight.
They want you to give up, drown in a river of despair.

They want you to think nothing can ever be safe, but
they can't look you in the eye or give a straight answer.
They only want to wear you down, drown in a river of despair.
But you can wear your silence like a gleaming stone amulet.

They can't look you in the eye or give a straight answer.
Remember how Darna had everyone's back in the village; she
cultivated silence like armor, wore truth like a gleaming amulet.
There's a difference between Bahala na, and Bahala na si Darna.