Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Your life is a length of cloth
whose measure you can’t 
calculate. Your shape has changed 
so many times: at sixth grade, when you
turned eighteen, before childbirth, after
childbirth, when your eldest child reached
the same age you were when you remarried.

Or it is a labyrinth of rooms filled
with various artifacts— birthday candles, 
a pair of orthopedic shoes, braces;
communion veil, mismatched socks.
You find your mother’s recipe for soup
but not for fruitcake, her thimble
and needle threader but not 
her sewing machine. 

Nights, in winter, you stand at the counter 
sifting flour, measuring salt and sugar, 
proofing the dough. It takes time 
for bread to rise, and no time at all for it 
to be sliced, toasted, eaten. You roll pork into 
a log studded with eggs, sausages, raisins.
How else will you be remembered 
besides through taste?
 
Lately, departure has been on everyone’s minds. 
The news is thick with war and terror, the deaths
of young and old. It takes effort to declare 
I just want to survive, even more to live it. When
you press your mouth against another’s and say 
Good night or Good morning, how simple
it feels, this belief that small, ordinary 
things might still save us.

The new year is a horse neighing in the field,
ready to race toward the future. 

It wants me to slide into the saddle and leave 
my baggage behind. 

A gate swings open on hinges of light. 

When we step through, the press and weight 
of yesterday is still palpable in my arms— 

persimmons and figs reddening in summer, 
wind tearing every leaf off the trees in fall. 

Sometimes ice and snow but mostly sleet, 
driftwood, and packed sand on the shore.

On one side is the river, and on the other 
trains travel the rails carrying coal.

I don’t know what the horse wants or if it wants
the same things I do but it carves tracks in the ground.

There is no standing still.

Perhaps our breaths, braided together,
will carry us toward whatever comes next.

Listen. It's only the second day of the year
but a page has already turned. Whose hand

is going to write the record of what you
vowed to fulfill? Once, you walked into

mornings sharp with mountain cold, ears
tuned for the sound of your ancestors' 

voices. Their words bronze dust motes 
spinning from cracked rafters, their touch 

strokes a sweet film on the surface of rice 
in cooking pots. This milk is light 

enough for babies' tongues. Evenings are rooms 
filled with the heaviness of clouds— they gather 

what spills from your eyes, into your hands, and 
every secret pocket in your clothes. Now they want 

to collect more of your thinning hair, plant 
the ache of a seed which knows there are fewer 

and fewer seasons ahead. Even so, they promise:
your heart will still know all manner of overflow.

We're not robots. We can identify
traffic lights, cars, motorcycles,
stairs, the darkness that wraps
even obstinate monuments in burial 
cloths when the sun goes down. 
We get a scrambled-up word, a code 
to authenticate in at least two 
ways and we comply. But in this 
kind of darkness, we've come to know 
the difference between the explosion 
of fireworks and that of vessel 
strikes in open water, the heat 
signatures of drones, their high-
pitched buzzing. A blade can pass
lightly over skin to uncover its hidden
lights. But deeper brings on the recoil,
the flinch, reflexes of confusion, 
anger. We feel this and this and see 
the similar flicker across strangers' 
faces in waiting rooms of doctors, 
in lines at the grocery store, 
at the rental office. The machine 
might never seem to run out of memory 
during a computation, but unboundedness 
is not the same as infinity. What we 
don't know could be the wound 
that keeps us hoping, alive.

Everything's poised on the lip of life
if not already submerged in it.

Firecrackers ignite, gongs sound.
Children bang pot lids together.

Someone discovers the crackling skin of young
roast pig while a farm building burns.

You lick your seared fingers at the same 
time you open your mouth for more.

In Bacolod I saw barbecue stands 
with skewers of chicken classified
by parts: livers, gizzards, wings,
breast, and isol (bishop's nose 
or chicken butt)— all marinated in 
coconut vinegar, lime, and annatto 
oil. My favorite is the latter, for 
the enticement to eat with the hands, 
dip the sizzled flesh into finger 
bowls of garlic-laced vinegar. Fat, 
that unctuous texture in the mouth.
In the '50s, poultry industries 
began to dump turkey tails in Pacific 
markets. These are parts that aren't 
usually served at squeamish dinner 
tables. Fish head and collars, marrow 
bones; oxtail and tongue, pig snouts, 
hocks, ears— everything our grandmothers
charred or salted, sautéed with the holy
trinity of garlic, onion, and tomato.
Our mothers packed sausages into
cleaned casings, thickened stews
with blood. Their kitchen knives
sang. Our hearts and bellies filled.
Our faces shone around the table. 
 

Crows land on the roof and make
the shingles rattle. Echoes 

run down the walls and into 
the foundation. If the beams 

aren't well-placed, a feather
could tilt the balance. Their coats 

are so black, they're almost blue. 
They preen in the sun with no need 

for combs, pearls, or buttons. 
Every day is black tie day. 

You would not know, unless 
you too were invited.

"... I watch the fields
their leased light
the fox at play"
          ~ D. Bonta


How it was late, and no one had started
to chop the mushrooms for the one intricate
main dish. And there was the log of meat

resting on the counter, waiting to be rolled
and wrapped in a stretch of pastry. Seeing
the helpless desperation in her eyes I said,

Tell me what you would like me to do— knowing
another pair of hands rushing the potatoes 
along or frothing oil and lemon together

to glisten the snipped greens might not 
ease her sadness, only serve as delegated 
distraction. I have been her, this

very moment at a different time, mourning
for a different child, but all the same.
The grief isn't for death, not simply

that matter of leaving the body, the body 
of the world, but perhaps keener in its 
own way. We are so grateful for 

the smallest signs of warming. For the bubble
lifting from the bottom of the glass. For  
the sound of a door opening after long silence.
 

"To move along the earth without keeping a ledger."
                                   ~ Jenny Xie


Without reaching for a rolled-up magazine to swat
     at a spider, maundering across the floor.

                 Show me a perfectly seamless surface with not
                       a cloud, not a groove, not a tongue.

Without forcing the prisoner's head between 
     his knees, lead him into a room for unholding.

                In sleep, watch what shape the body curls into.

What it mouths, without grinding 
     molars into chalk.

                Without holding the reflex to the memory 
                       of what caused it.

Untether the dream horse from its post
     so where it goes, the gleam returns to the grass.

                Unsour the milk and release the butter
                       churn from its crock.

Without begrudging the custard another egg,
     give the day its long-owed due of sweetness.

                No more, no less.

From across the boulevard, crowds stream 
toward the entrance to the battleship whose nine

16-inch guns, three triple-gun turrets, twenty
5-inch dual purpose guns and forty-nine 8-inch

Oerlikon auto cannons are decked out in over two
million lights. To get to the main deck, the lines

(single file) must navigate two bridges, but only
after walking through the museum converted into

a white wilderness. In one hall, an animated 
tree. In another, strung on wires from 

the ceiling, a polar bear treads air. It could be 
drowning in an actual sea, while the rest of us, 

faces craned upwards, could be flailing in
shipwreck. Somewhere, a white queen dispenses 

her white benedictions. If light is the purpose 
here, there's a surplus of the kind that thistles

from one wire to another in a grid cast over 
ten thousand square feet of teak deck. Deployed

to the Pacific during World War II, the ship
shelled targets during the second Philippine

campaign and the Battles of Iwo Jiwa and Okinawa.
It fired its final shots at the end of Desert

Storm. White-hot flash along the horizon. Smoke
and orange flames. Smell of burnt metal and cordite.