Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Abundant
as the summer leaves along the avenues,
as the cries of crickets puncturing
the hot metal plate of night—

So the body dreams
of the coolest well
that it might lower itself into:
blue with no end, keeping its secrets to itself.

 

In response to Via Nevativa: La Blanca Soledad / Pale Solitude....

“…and each of your kisses lasted a day
and the time between two kisses
lasted a night.”

“…y cada beso tuyo
era un día;
y el tiempo que mediaba entre dos besos
una noche.”

from “Historia de mi muerte” / “Story of My Death”
by Leopoldo Lugones, trans. D. Bonta

What to pawn for a sweet,
a leftover gem, paper slipped
into folded circles of bread
as you move from one
darkness to the next?

*

What to feed to the dog
that guards the gates, the one
who angles hot, greedy breath;
ready paws prepared to seize
your face in its fangs?

*

What to feel in the interval
of flame after the phoenix
dissolves in a shroud of ash,
before feathers return
to adorn its breast?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Historia de mi muerte....

The earth has ears, news
has wings. And the stars,
being so far away, no longer
see the need to pass judgment.

*

The pain of the little finger
is felt by the whole body—
So then see how the warm
coffee softens hard bread.

*

If you are going a long way, go slowly.
The rain falls so it can fill the water jar.
No matter how long the procession,
it still ends up in church.

“our estate like a bauble…” ~ D. Bonta

I gather up shreds,
I collect shards.

My wages: the scraps
that no one wanted.

My craft: bulldozing
the field for the swarm,

composting the spume
for the renegade dream.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Primates.

The patience
of Job, the wanderer’s
twenty years, the virtue
of the wife who nightly
wove a winding sheet
to rip apart at dawn—

The world’s most
bitter wars that lasted
more than decades,
the bodies in the trench
kissing crumpled letters
or photographs goodbye—

The long courtship
and the always waiting,
the sacrifice that ends
with vows at last,
if at the brink
of the grave—

The hundred-thousand-
thousand times wings fold:
and we’ll attach on flimsy
strings these patterned
birds, these bits of prayer
set to flutter in the wind—

“Somewhere in the fog
the waitress
strangles a ghost”

(“En la niebla
la garzona
estrangula un fantasma.”)

~ from “Canción cubista” by José María Eguren, trans. Jean Morris and Dave Bonta

In the rain,
by the balete tree,
a woman dressed all in white
thumbs a ride.

And at the corner,
where the journalist was last seen
before soldiers took him away,
the road is an ideogram

looping into the hills.
Whose crushed blue
duffel bag is that,
stuffed into the corner

of the waiting shed?
Only the cat might know,
prowling through
the mossy quiet.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Birds of Smoke....

In the colony of the body,
everything that grows
is offering—

In the mortised joints
between webs of sugar and salt,
gears turn and the gates

sluice bile from the honey,
or cloudy froth. Broody
liver, spleen’s

dark halves: like serfs
to a feudal lord, we hold up
the unfinished, we ask for time.

 

In response to Via Negativa: (De)composition.

1 / El Nopal

Each spiked bud is a revolution
prickling the flat surface of the moon.

2 / El Diablito

You should never give gifts to the gods
that take you under.

3 / La Mano

After I am stripped down, I conceal nothing.
Someone once unrolled parchment, pointed, said Here.

4 / El Corazon

Tomorrow, forgiveness.
Tonight, the feast of tears.

5 / El Alacran

It is true, I have seen the venomous
cowering beneath the house-post.

“Viajo sozinha com o meu coração.”
(“I travel alone with my heart.”)

~ from “Despedida” (“Farewell”) by Cecília Meireles, trans. Natalie d’Arbeloff

At the shoe repairer’s,
a canvas boot unpaired
for at least two decades—

I want to reach inside
the window to touch the grimy
laces and pass them, overlapping,

through rusted grommets; then
tie a bow. A poet reminded me
that every poem should be a kind

of prayer— Should have a heart
red-blue and heaviest at midnight,
sloping from the branch,

under which the faithful
lover waits with open mouth
for the first dewdrop to fall.

 

In response to Via Negativa: How to recognize the road....

“I write my life.” ~ D. Bonta

Drink quickly, we’re told. Live
immediately, before the stream

changes course, before the water
makes good on the threats

it is always making about our utter
effacement, our certain oblivion.

So what if it does? Don’t linger
in the bath that certain evenings

draw you into: all melancholy, all
purple shade and stupefying incense.

Rain or no rain, tomorrow the sky
is the ledger on which the sun

once more pawns its only diadem.
Who is without debt? Who is without

a raft or gondola of burdens?
In the crepuscular mist it’s easy

to be entranced by the long,
trailing banners of sadness,

by the fixed and illusory orbit
of their ferment. You want to know

the word with which to dispel them,
what bitten seeds to disgorge

from under the tongue. Perhaps
winter is merely winter and not

ransom of one body for another.
Perhaps the fig and the plum

burst out of their skins only
because heat has unstitched them,

and not because their hearts constrict
from a sadness they cannot bear.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Contingency.