Author: Luisa A. Igloria

On the label of a small
plastic mold of almond jelly,
a warning: Please be careful and chew
separately before swallowing.
You stop for a second, then realize
what it might be trying to say is
Potential choking hazard! Or, don’t
let your child try to consume
this treat in just one swallow.
You know this is true: how often
has a mouthful of smooth come back
up the hatch, tasting like bile;
or had you doubled up in the night,
wondering What the hell was I thinking?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Out.

Why not return
in proper coin
what you have taken
of my wool or spice,
for copper sluiced
through mountains’ veins?
Ah, I know that fear:
it’s you you glimpse
beneath my alien skin,
familiar form that darkens
your dreams but stoops,
ordered, to clear the cane
and harvest crops for your white-
linened table. With each
pass of the machete, a stalk
surrendered to your storehouse.
At end of day I wash my face
and dust-streaked arms at the pump,
careful to conceal the meagre
earnings you might confiscate
on small pretext— as if
the indentured have no right to call
back their own names at night.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Proverbial.

The woman at the meeting wants to know
about representation: where her ideas went,
why her name isn’t listed
as a volunteer.
The room grows quiet as her voice
deepens in timbre, rises
in pitch and complaint— The body
of documents we assemble
through the hours
fills binders lined up on the shelves.
Outside, in their inside,
insects build their own structures:
walls woven of their tongues’
and bodies’ excretions,
tunnels lined with bits of hair.
Every now and then we find
a cell abandoned, its hinges
torn asunder in the wind.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Evergreens.

What I want is immediacy, the nub
of the moment pressed without doubt
into my side, the tremor that comes
sometimes before sight, before taste
or touch. Whatever might be lost, don’t
take that away from me: stars pouring
out of the firmament, not ever holding
back the flood over my small ladle.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Fat Tuesday.

When the phone rings, sometimes I get palpitations.
Worry causes palpitations.
Mothers seem to have an inexhaustible supply of worry.
Worry can be aggravated by having a new cellphone model with apps
that allow you to imagine you can know more than you actually can
about situations over which you really have no control.
In the meantime, small birds fly up into bare branches.
The outline of orange glimpsed through the crosshatched branches
is not fire but the sun setting over the Elizabeth river.
Winter is bone white in patches, slush and grey in others.
The plumber said it was lucky the flow that bubbled from toilet flange
into the hallway from the sewer backup was no more than an inch.
The surface got wet, but the heartwood was spared.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Grand jete.

How is it winter still, how can we
be called to keep burying the desolate

in its customary abode? Not underground
but in the air, where no limits hold—

beyond weightlessness, demise of blooms
pressed into premature fluorescence.

Pity the skirl on the crest
of a bagpipe; pity the ice cap,

one pure sweep of cloud— I’d ask
for a bed woven by kind-hearted doves.

I’d ask for one bright fruit plucked
out of heaven: that is to say,

any mouthful of earth
that I’d been widowed from.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Winter Gardener.

“…time,/ inventor of places with no weight” ~ Octavio Paz

4

It is the small and almost withered
that give off most scent: the nearly
disappeared, the once-on-this-night-
only blooms that tear the air
with their perfumes at night.

“…do you hear the footsteps in the next room?” ~ Octavio Paz

3

Lip of bowl pressed to lips,
head tipped back: then a flood
of liquid down the throat—
Sick body, your calcium is
lime—leached. You too, fruit
of the earth, you do not know
how long the tincture boiled
the soil from which
you were extracted.

*

“My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field
where one is sown and a hundred reaped.” ~ Octavio Paz

2

From the high windows, at noon;
or in the eaves, once I heard
the moan of a dove, the creak
of a bedspring, a cry, the sound
a hundred feathers might make
beating against another’s breast.

*

“…listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return…” ~ Octavio Paz

1

I believe you, poet, when you write
of how night is now more night
in the grove, how lightning
has nestled among the leaves—
But did you see when something heavier
than lightning came to roost, demon
with burning eyes in the corner of the yard?
It settled spindly legs and arms on the topmost
branch of the avocado tree, which immediately sagged
from its sad weight— how many decades of anger
and regret? It lit a cigar, hairy mofo with plans
to apparently stay a while— And then you said
listen to the rain running over the terrace
and I did, watched how it overfilled each vessel
that could not help being open. And in the morning,
what was rime and salt washed away, or turned to circles
on stone tile and clay gradually drying in the sun.

*