Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Who chose the name begining with 
the letter Z for my mother? And who 

chose to name my real mother after 
the crescent moon? Growing up

as they did during the war, they lived
during a time of great frugality; and so

the extravagance of their names is both
amazement and mystery. They thought

of wildflowers and rising moons during 
a season of bayonets and stones, funerals

and stale bread. They dreamt of cities rebuilt  
from labyrinths traced by snails. Mother zephyr, 

mother moon, teach us how to train our eyes
to what lasts, even as we inhabit these ruins.
 

Look at all the potential  
that still exists: a finger-

touch to light the stove, 
a tray of ice you can melt 

then freeze again if you so 
desire. Put the kettle on to boil.

Drink tea; incline your head 
in the direction of hills

where hands gather such leaves
in the first mists of morning.

To walk through the town that keeps reappearing in 
your dreams, you begin at the point where you are. Green 
gate opening out into the alley— one way leading up 
and away into the town, the other leading down the slope 
to where no one you know sleeps in houses you no longer 
recognize. To walk through the town that keeps materializing 
in dreams, you return to the last version that flickered 
in your mind. A daguerrotype which someone has tinted with 
color— a purply sky, inky lines of pine on distant ridges; 
a woman and child walking hand-in-hand down the hill 
to a low building where the local credit union has decided 
to bake and sell loaves of bread, raise and skin rabbits 
in the back lot. The yeasty smell from ovens. 

Rows of overhead lamps, 
the light milky like flesh 
under peeled-back skin.
 

I drew a bath with herbs to nurse you back to health.
I had no recipe then, only the deep ache in my gut.
 
             The deep ache in your gut is the oldest map you have.
             Cassia bark and stars of anise, stolen laurel leaves.

In the heated water— cassia and anise, fragrance of laurel.
Rain pelted the roof and made the inside of our room a cave.

             Rain on the roof, misted walls in our room of a cave.
             So many years ago you let me hold your hand like this.

How long it's been since you let me hold your hand like this.
I trusted time; I never thought time could be cruel like this. 

             I trusted time but never thought it could be cruel like this. 
             We touched foreheads the way water and shore come close.

We touched foreheads the way water and the shore come close.
There was a time I drew a bath with herbs to nurse you back to health.

There are stories that read like a straight
line: A to B to C to The End; and others

in which either everything happens or nothing
happens, meaning epiphany is elusive or we 

are stubborn— we insist that significance 
is the only way we could justify existence. 

Tonight is the night of a large planetary 
parade, the evening alignment of six planets 

along the ecliptic. It's tempting to think 
this is magical or ominous or fortuitous, 

but science merely says these events can happen 
every hundred years or so. A neighbor who never 

smoked a day in her life dies from lung cancer,
and a wife-beater winds up mayor of his town.

What is the plot in such stories and where 
does the tension come to a head? Does it ever

resolve? In myths we're trained to anticipate
how irresolvable dilemmas are turned into

figures on the landscape or in the sky—
A girl in danger turns into a tree, another

becomes the orb-webber who will eternally  
hang by her own thread. Certain gods, if you 

believe in them, uphold their idea of order
in the cosmos. Who do you pray to at night?

(MLK Day 2025)

The days have been dark, and I
don't know what else to do to lift
that kind of darkness. So I was going 
to mail a care package to my daughter. 
Little things— a box of tea, two 
sweet buns and snacks from the Filipino 
bakery. I forgot the post office 
is closed, and the UPS store; children 
aren't in school; federal workers have 
a day off. It's freezing cold again:
we leave the hot water tap on as a thin 
drizzle. All morning, I have felt
the sort of heaviness that sometimes
remains, even after a long bout 
of crying. I listen to a livestream 
where the panelists speak of ways 
we might lift each other up when we 
feel like that. One of them says, 
hard as it seems, we must laugh 
together, even be silly. Feed each
other, come together, hold 
each other up. We can still burn 
bright as the burning hills. We 
can burn even brighter.

trauma decants from one

vessel to another. Imagine a long
line of flasks ranged across a dusty

sill. Who set down the first piece? Who
took it up and tipped the liquid into

the mouth of another? Every pour tries
to manage its load of amber without 

disturbing the sediments at the bottom; 
they ripple upward anyway, murky with promise 

and repetition, swollen with char. We can't seem 
to float free. Though we could change the water 

and feed it lavender and rosemary, each seems
as dear as a child we're unwilling to orphan. 

There are days that feel like over-
       ripe fruit: bruised, sitting
sadly in the bowl after having been
       handled then returned, or 
peeled after hesitation only to be 
      discarded. I want them 
to simply be the way they should— skins 
      mostly unblemished, gently rounded, 
with only a hint of acid or
      bitterness should they still
be green but torn open before 
      their time. There are days  
that feel heavy on my palms, as if 
      something hardened their sweetness  
into a pit at their core; and I must find
      the right instrument to extricate
its heart before it darkens. Night falls;
      leaves rustle. I hear insects 
begin to tune their instruments and want 
      something to break open all 
that's stony; I want to call out  
      and know it will be answered— whether 
by owl or foghorn or animals lowing in
      the fields, just as the lake's 
surface reflects the moon's face
      as it looks upon it, upon me.   
 

to say I too, talk to my dead;
I tell them about my day and my most 
recent woes, ask them about the terrible 
mistakes I've made as a parent. (They
listen in sympathetic silence.)

I've learned to stick my neck 
out and say something rather 
than nothing, admit I don't see
the point behind things like Burning
Man. (Glamping as "decommodification" 
and "self reliance in community?")

I am not ashamed I had to change
my shirt in the car, in a parking lot, 
after I puked all over myself. (Just think, 
—somewhere, anywhere, someone right now 
is having a wardrobe malfunction or sitting 
on a toilet, having soiled their knickers.) 

When my heart could not stop
lurching from worry, I have reached out 
—blindly, even perhaps unwarrantedly, but 
motivated by the desire to ease someone 
else's pain (even if I know there are 
many things beyond my control). 

Can you blame me for trying?
Can you blame me for wanting 
to exhaust the means available 
to me, if these result in some
reprieve? I am not ashamed to admit
I am that kind of person. I am not

ashamed to plead for mercy.
 

(Thismia rodwayi) 


There's a small, red-orange flower
that pokes up like a tongue from under
damp forest cover, as if without 
stem and leaves. 

The plant guides say it doesn't 
have any green pigment allowing 
absorption of energy from light— 
Perhaps it was born under 

a serious star, on a broody 
night. Perhaps it gets by 
through a kind of ironic 
detachment: wanting 

little, often overlooked 
despite its lightbearing 
name. Like it, I wish I could 
slip, subterranean, through life.

So far below, as if in a well,
how can our cracked, exhausted
hearts brave the elements? Above,  
bits of blue show through clouds.