Author: Luisa A. Igloria

After things in the world begin to seriously
     feel bound for hell in a handbasket, for months
I wallow in my inertia and can't seem to haul 
     myself out of bed to go to the gym. I feel 
the flabby parts of my body taking over the muscle
     I was trying to build, offering their soft jello 
lining under the waistband of my workout pants. But  
     it's the pain shooting from my right hip down 
to the knee and calf that forces me to go back; 
     the tightness in my legs, getting up in the morning.
Funny how this thing done with pulleys and dumb- 
     bells is called resistance training: resistance
meaning the capacity to oppose or withstand 
     an obstacle or impeding force, the biggest one
in this case being your own body— each day toting  
     its limbs and organs around, so long carrying 
brickloads of grief it's forgotten how to let go of.      

At a regional food fair, next to a vendor
selling Asian-themed Crocs charms and another
handing out chile-lime dried beef samples, 
there's a guy inviting folks to try air-
fried crickets. There's one each in small
paper cups: their compact bodies no larger
than an inch, their hind legs neatly folded 
(not, as I once thought, the part of their 
anatomy responsible for producing their 
chirping song). Nearby, an oil-glossed mound 
of them in a bowl. From a little distance, 
they look no different from other crackling 
finger food my uncles scooped up by the handful 
in between swigs of cold San Mig: besides crickets, 
deep-fried locusts, pork belly, ceviche. It's with
their wings that crickets make their music— one wing 
has a scraper, the other an edge like a file. The central 
part of the wing is called the harp, and it amplifies 
the sounds they make. Some species will eat anything, 
whereas others feed only on flowers, fruit, and leaves. 
Their collective noun is "orchestra"— which is fitting,
even in the moment we bite down and the crunch 
resonates for a tiny minute in the balcony of our mouths.

When we're looking at houses,
we ask our realtor what neighborhood
isn't so close to water and he scoffs.
This whole town is surrounded by water.
The Atlantic, the bay, three rivers. 
There are local legends of peninsulas
formed in the wake of nor'easters— 
or maybe some god spitting furiously 
out of his mouth. Barely two months after 
we arrive, we put chairs on top of the dining 
table, fill the tub with water, and contemplate
leaving town. In 1749, the Chesapeake rose 15 
feet and battered everything in sight. Every 
rain that goes on for days could lead to 
catastrophic flooding. People used to hold 
hurricane parties, but I don't think they do 
now. We listen to the news on the radio 
about rivers in other parts of the country;
how many have been rescued, how many
are still missing. How the houses bobbed
on roiling waters like toys in a giant drum.

I have no sons; I've only birthed 
daughters, each given a distinct name. 
Sons can be named after their fathers, 
and their fathers' fathers before them. 
A Junior; the second, third, fourth.
Perhaps a remnant of kingly practice? 
Keep it all in the family— the name, 
the wealth; power, property, influence. 
Such inbreeding among royals was once 
thought to be the cause of haemophilia, 
though really the disorder is due to 
a mutation in the genes. Rare clot, 
flower blooming beneath the skin:
whose eulogy do you serve? Which
rebel thread pulls away, thickening 
to scroll its own emphatic calligraphy? 

"Are you – Nobody – too?"
            ~ Emily Dickinson


A man falls asleep in the deep 
folds of a department store massage chair, 
and no one notices. It's dark when he wakes,
still inside the store now empty and shuttered
for the night. It's not something he intended
to do, and is mildly embarrassed at the attention
it generates. Whereas, there are apparently
people who choose to disappear from their lives,
even hiring "night movers" to spirit them away
without a trace to a different and undisclosed
location. In Japan, they're called jouhatsu,
which means evaporation. They let go of their 
names, every material possession they ever 
owned; their jobs, their network of friends. 
They even let go of their families. Some 
disappear to save face, because they can't 
live down the shame of a terrible mistake. 
Some have become disenchanted with their old 
lives, others because the weight of existence 
is too much though death isn't an appealing 
option. Their sudden disappearance makes it seem 
as if they simply evaporated into the atmosphere. 
But they still have bodies; many of them may be 
floating around in big cities, in plain sight— 
pale and anonymous as sadness that can't be 
tied to any particular thing, with no need 
to answer to the call of anything other 
than the overwhelming desire to withdraw.
   

When is it a metaphor, and when is the blue
curtain just a blue curtain, a car stalled
on the road just the result of a bad battery and
not a cosmic memo about never getting to where 
you want to go in life? There are three days 
this summer when the moon's orbit will once more 
place it at its farthest point from the equator; 
this causes the earth to spin much faster, resulting 
in shorter days. But what astrophysicists mean is 
shorter by milliseconds— the loss of time may not 
even be immediately noticeable, until a half 
century from now when perhaps we'll no longer 
have 24-hour days or 7-day workweeks. Other kinds 
of losses might only seem inconsequential—the hairs 
on your head, the thinning of sparrow populations. 
The decline of honeybees and wildflowers from habitat 
loss. Do you wonder why it's so difficult now 
to hear the whippoorwill sing its name, signalling 
the end of the season of loneliness or frost?

When I no longer care 
about the world, let me 
sit on a rock perch where 
my hair can be  
                         combed by the wind.

When I no longer want to bind 
my breasts with cotton and drink 
from an orchard well, let me sleep 
in a room without clocks 
                         in the middle of a monsoon.

The days are full 
of horrors and lamentations,
nights with visions 
of banishment and exile with
                         no hope of return.

Yet deeper blue than the sky,
hydrangeas keep rewriting
a narrative of ordinary survival.
Their dry, petaled heads persist,
                         even in the absence of water.

Articles on home maintenance warn about breaks
in the plaster: how they may be a sign of something
more serious in the foundation, or that the soil 
underneath has shifted and softened through the years, 
or both. But it's simply the way things go as they 
get older and more worn. Chips in the stucco, 
scratches on once smooth sanded floors. When  
we moved in, this house was also already old. 
Having been vacant for some time, it was as if 
the pipes sighed awake from a long drought 
the first time we ran the showers and flushed 
the toilets. The realtor found a small nest 
of rodents in the crawl space, and called 
extermination services. We learned new words 
like soffit, fascia, and transom window; and also 
that the modest, side-gabled Cape Cod style dates 
back to the 1800s. From the floor outline in the apron-
sized dining room and a full window set into the wall 
behind the hutch, we can see some of the original 
bones of this house: how and where more rooms 
were added, even as closet space remained the same 
for times when people may have had a need for much 
less in their lives. In summertime, men in shorts 
and baseball caps knock on doors in the neighborhood, 
asking Do you have spiders, mosquitoes, ants, and 
are they a problem for you? We always turn them 
away. Sometimes, a tiny green grasshopper comes in. 
Sometimes, a cricket trills unseen in a corner. 
Moths are our favorite— we like to think they're 
visitations from our dead, gone so many years but there,
like a glimmer of something precious in the cracks. 
 

      Once, a fish slid its sinuous body 
into the sea's cloud cover; 
                              it was taken to task  
      for not appearing before the gods. For keeping 
its own counsel, 
                 it received a lashing of bones. 
      I feel a natural kinship with it, but also  
with the lizard 
                 skittering through a labyrinth 
      of landmines and guillotines. Kinship with 
the orange-blushed 
                    mountain shrike and its constant 
      alarm of krr-krr-krr, and with ghosts 
of innumerable histories thickening 
                                    the air 
      that we breathe— Lock eyes with any creature 
you meet: the current  
                      you feel is felt by them, 
      too. Some are more expert at shedding 
their skin when it no longer 
                             serves them.