Author: Luisa A. Igloria

And certain nights
bring me the word neroli:
first the white bud opens,
amalgam of rain and honey;
then the pucker of its musk
heating up the sheets in the room.

In response to Via Negativa: Sunday morning.

“after foolish talk
the discourse
of rain” – D. Bonta

Earthquakes do not clamor for attention:
you could say they trump all versions of Cartesian proof.

Every time the odds are stacked,
the only ensuing discussion is what history tends to favor.

So much for talk of loss and triumph, for the length
of his reach compared to his opponent’s; his weight and class.

How fast is a punch delivered? It’s hard to determine if sounds
welling up in the amphitheater are from pain or jubilation.

Those who work a hotline know which exchanges are code for help.
I forget when presidentiable became a word.

In response to Via Negativa: Cowboy haiku.

The box held pellets
of compacted soil,
a growing medium
where I could sow
in each compartment
seed after seed as if
I could fashion an ark
out of the promise
of their green.

No one makes
house calls anymore,
for elegy is the order
of the day.

In response to Via Negativa: Missed appointment.

Who has not seen the gypsies,
dream and bronze,
their heads held high,
their hooded eyes?

I heard them early today,
coming through the streets,
bringing news of the most
recent apocalypse—

In their hands the smell
of leveled mountains,
and in their hair the blue
persistence of dreams.

Night clung to the folds
of their sleeves, and green
forest burr. In their mouths,
the names of those too soon

surrendered. I was not afraid
and I held a window open: I called
though I knew they would not spare
my friend. They were us and I

was them, riding hard beneath
the olive ripple of leaves,
a sorrowful psalm of clouds,
the sun’s hook of trembling gold.

~ in memoriam, Rhodora Montemayor Palinar

In response to Via Negativa: Killing Lorca.

A mule is the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey.

A female mule that has estrus cycles and thus, in theory, could carry a fetus, is called a “molly” or “molly mule,” though the term is sometimes used to refer to female mules in general. Pregnancy is rare, but can occasionally occur naturally as well as through embryo transfer.

A mule is also any kind of shoe or slipper into which the foot may willingly be eased, without need for stays or zippers or laces. It is easy to kick off a mule when one is tired of wearing it on the foot.

In Indonesia, in a jail cell, a Filipina maid awaits her execution tonight. She will be shot. She will face a firing squad of no less than twelve. So far no intervention has succeeded in staying the order for her death.

She is referred to as a mule in news reports. In some, she is called a dupe mule.

Is a mule that is duped more or less a dupe or more or less a mule?

But a mule is also someone that is made to carry or transport illegal drugs.

Her name is Mary Jane, and she is the mother of two children. In another news report her sister holds up a scarf that Mary Jane knitted and gave to her as a gift.

Why would a mule want to knit?

Why would she who once barely escaped rape at the hands of a former employer, want to be a mule?

What I want to know is, what happened to the woman who lured her, duped her into carrying an extra suitcase when she was put on a plane that was supposed to take her to her new job?

Where is she tonight, as Mary Jane waits in her cell and listens to the ticking of the hours?

I look at her photograph and I think: she does not have the face of a mule.

When I read of Java I used to think of puppets in shadow plays, their long slim fingers painted gold, their heads trembling beneath the weight of filigree, beneath the dulled light of a moon on strings.

But now in the town of Cilacap near Nusakambangan island, coffins have been hewn and made ready, each with a cloth, a shade of white.

I want to know: why white? why the shade of bathroom tile, why the color of the commode whose surfaces she must have scrubbed and bleached each week, only for others to defile?

As if the protocols could make the lie pristine.

***

Update on Mary Jane Veloso: last minute reprieve on her execution granted

“Before the mouth,
who owned me?” ~ D. Bonta

The sea.
The salt I drank
in my mother’s womb.
The dark I climbed,
round and round,
one handhold
at a time.
Somewhere in the middle,
it dimpled. Light broke
in the middle, somewhere.
One handhold
round and round
in the dark I climbed,
womb of my mother’s
salt I drank:
the sea.

In response to Via Negativa: Stewardship.

The music is slow: a tango
filled with rain and lamplight,
a stem clenched in a woman’s teeth.
It makes me want to gather the darkest
red in my hands: thick paste of pounded
bleeding-heart flowers, gumamela the prize
we climb a barbed wire fence to pluck—
Disaster always its own remedy
except when the hum starts again
and the string forgets there ever was a time
it did not know what it meant to be rendered.