Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The Buddha listens as her friend G
remembers the day a pair of cops came
to her home, to break the news:

they’d fished out her son’s body
from the Shuylkill river— no marks
of violence, his pockets empty, his feet

unshod. You know in your bones, says G.
Her mother, who opened the door, crumpled
to the floor like a sheet yanked

from the line. In old myths and sacred texts
are passages which describe how, when a child
is born, a life index plant is set in the soil

by the front door, along with his mother’s
afterbirth. Whatever happens to the child
is mirrored in the curling vine, the wild

hibiscus, the golden shower tree. No words
were needed for what shriveled like a leaf
in the heart, constricted the gut:

invisible blow dealt to the base
of the staff, lone bird that held out its
familiar note in the wood, now stilled.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

of expectations, of the million and one ways
in which the bread might not rise, the cup

might not run over, the tire might go flat,
the light bulb go out. She is tired of the times
intention is thwarted, detoured, outright taken

over by some other outcome less ideal than what
was originally desired. The Buddha is tired
of going last, eating the crust, saving

the ribbons and the wrapping paper, reheating
the scraps; being the open door, the one they come to,
the shoulder to cry on, the purse that both makes do

and makes it right. She wants to be the one not
singled out by The Boss for turning her Out of Office
message on, while others go away without so much as a by-

your-leave. Who wrote the rules about selflessness and virtue,
about retribution in coin or in kind? All everyone wants
every now and then is to be seen for what they really are.

In response to Via Negativa: No trespassing.

Dark-pulped when sweet,
prepared to stain your mouth—

Lift the membranes
crossing this moon-

shaped face and pull
the sections loose:

storm the little turret where
my half-blood tides reside.

In response to Via Negativa: Blood Moon.

his third grade teacher from years ago: diminutive
terror of the daily twenty-item spelling quiz, bespectacled,
hair pulled always into a severe chignon— How she parsed

sentences across three panels of chalkboard, lectured on
the solidity of nouns and verbs and the relative shiftiness
of adverbs. Therefore, when he reads the half-leafed-out lilac
seems to glow, achingly green against the brown woods,

his mind begins to revise: is it achingly, the half-leafed out lilac
seems to glow green, or is it the half-leafed out lilac seems
to glow a painful shade of green? He suspects that Miss Sifora Fang
would not approve. Likely, she would interrogate the very lilac

by the garden gate as to its blushing intentions, and certainly
the speaker as to why the sight of light striking the undersides
of leaves should stir a wound. Once, she sternly asked
the Buddha: Why are you crying? as he struggled to find

the right words for a difficult lesson. To be precise
does not necessitate complication, except that it is so
difficult to pluck the right thoughts from the always moving
branch, and find the words to flesh out what it is they mean.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

All the ephemerals are emerging—
Here they are at cafe tables, shrugging

off the morning drizzle as if it, too,
were a malaise of modernity (middle

syllable drawn out like a small stretch
of prairie), nothing that couldn’t be

fixed with a cup of good Colombian
coffee and a dose of the internet.

And in the rain, squirrels, gulls, and crows
work on their own version of bricolage—

collecting seeds and nuts, shavings, plastic
twine, leftovers from dumpsters in the parking lot.

In response to Via Negaiva: Up in the hollow.

Accost the moon as it scuds
across the fields.

Brake hard
against the surf.

Chain the bike to the back gate, then
come in and take off your shoes.

Don’t wake the sleeping parakeet
swinging in its cage.

Every other object in the room
conceals a flaw.

Find each, and you shall have
succeeded where no one else has.

Gongs sound
a muffled music;

heard through burlap
thicknesses of air,

it’s no longer obvious
they’re brass with jawbone handles.

Joss sticks in the alcove
sweeten the air.

Kindness, they remind,
is all.

Long as
the days might be,

memory is
longer by far.

Nothing goes unpunished; not
even the skin around a callus;

oversight is merely time’s way
of staging an intermission.

Pillow books catch
the days’ unsaid intentions,

questions that we’ll mull over
in the afterward.

Rouged by heat, I like when our
foreheads touch lightly after love.

Stay with me and pretend
ours is a house on stilts anchored

to water. We’ll watch
the colors change,

undo their drafts,
revise what came before.

Voyage is a noun
or verb;

what is the grammar
of the states between the two?

Exactitude is not possible;
I’ve heard it said we

yearn because we’re born
into a chain of misunderstandings:

zoetropes flash brightly lit
illusions of static pictures moving.

In response to Via Negativa: Insomniac's to-do list.

Kept closer
than friends,

kept sharp
in surveillance—

kept in
check

so a plot
never

thickens
with foes.

In response to Via Negativa: Spring appetites.

Everything reduces to one country, one town, one night
in a rain that falls on the grass like a halo of quills.

Think of it: how blades of grass, their green, their lush
underlining are no match for a bed like a halo of quills.

Confess through the shadowed grille of your deepest heart:
there are wounds not yet healed of their halo of quills.

In gold-leafed scrolls and triptychs, trace with your finger
the figures of saints and martyrs with their halo of quills.

Just before I drop off to sleep, a tremor shakes my frame—
as if my leg or hand brushed against a halo of quills.

Enter my dreams like rain, like the tipped echo
of an echo deflecting from points in a halo of quills.

In response to Via Negativa: In hepatica time.