Author: Luisa A. Igloria

(after Mahmoud Darwish)

I too come from there, this place of few surviving photographs.
I have some unused stamps, I have some books of yellowed paper
and a map, somewhere, whose windows are all creased.
I have a secret that is not so secret
to those who know, and siblings
where you would not think to find them.
I used to have a house in the elbow
of an alley shaped like the letter L.
Mine is the subtrahend devised of distant hills,
and the background noise of trains after midnight.

Mine is a pair of ghost
magnolia trees, and a woman dressed in white
eternally trying to hitch a ride.
And the smell of dough in the morning,
and the invisible grain of eggshells in the coffee.
How amazed I am to think that once,
at the age of nine, I packed a paper bag with a cloth
handkerchief and a toothbrush, and attempted to run away.

I too come from there, where the sky scribes its name
with the monsoon’s hundred thousand letters.
But even when it rains I know its underlying body is sunflowers,
is made of cypress and old pine.
I know it lights the tapers during power outages.
I know it burns to ash the lottery tickets that did not win.

spun of thinnest
crystal, by the bell-
ringing cricket.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Paper Trouble.

“…ash provides the most elegant
last transport imaginable.” ~ Amy Gerstler

She picked up a nest blown out of the trees in the storm. No traces of its former inhabitants, not one feather or hair.

*

A limo passed them on the highway one day in summer: from the black-tinted window rolled down, a bare leg; toes dangling a lit cigarette.

*

On a canvas pallet, amid the rubble of the fallen hospital, his slight frame shook from the effort to exhale. It was early in the monsoon season, and a fine spray of rain made outlines of every form.

*

He’d written in his will that he wanted his ashes mixed with hers, in one of the old bee-boxes from their farm.

*

Imagine the hive at night: cellular structure of breathing, each minute papered with amber, riven with unfiltered sweet.

*

In the end, the papery husk falls away from the clove. The shorn head lies in the lap of the wind, the face newly washed buries itself in the arms of elusive scent.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Horticultured.

Punch down a lump of dough and break up all the little houses of air. Roll them out flat, then gather them back to the center and they rise again, higher than the rim of the bowl.

After the dark, bitter green of herbs, here are lemons to pucker the mouth, pomegranate seeds to sweeten the fingers, sprigs of mint to freshen the breath.

A wooden block, dried buckwheat for a pillow; a cup of beans to fill a little sack. Every last one streaked with its secret name.

Was any of it enough, was it too little? Why should it be difficult to open the heart wider and give thanks to the open sky?

Year after year, the shoemaker shapes the same kind of sole. After he dies, the only blueprints that remain are those that rain and wind will not have erased from the dirt.

O with what effort everyone pushes with all they have toward the unseen— Before the plane taxies for takeoff, the girl in 5A touching her forehead to her prayer book, adjusting her veil. The man muttering curses under his breath, the child biting back his tears. Two rows back, the girl with a long-stemmed rose, the girl with a tattoo in Edwardian script. That girl swapping her boots with five-inch heels for platforms with a vampy toe. But O, the world’s oblivious to our plans. Beyond the gently bucking seats, beyond the porthole-sized windows: lakes of clouds with no visible bodies swimming in them. Render: which can mean some action to make offering, or one of a few procedures a skillful hand employs to bring fat to the surface. Mother, my thoughts turn to you like a dog paddling furiously through floodwaters. There in the mountains you grow older by the day, but appear ageless in my dreams.

Q: When you answer the telephone, how do you say hello?

Q: Describe the language in which you dream; is that your first language?

Q: Do you wear your skin like a coat, or like a shell?

Q: Should we publish your book— who will read it?

Q: How many letters do they have in their alphabet?

Q: What is the likelihood of getting eaten by a lion penned in a cage?

Q: What is the shortest distance between several broken points on a historical timeline?

Q: How many copies can you provide of your own book?

Q: What is the principle by which mercury sidles and divides?

Q: Have you ever needed to hide your true identities?

Q: Do you recognize the kind of mind that obeys aphorisms about staying in one’s place?

Q: How many words do you believe have no possible translations?

Q: Do you understand there may not be any opportunity to defend your position?

Q: You will have to provide your own reception provisions, including cutlery, food, and drink.

Q: You may stand in the foyer whole waiting for the counter to open.

Q: Please leave your shoes, umbrellas, and wet things in the bin by the door.

Q: Please make sure to leave your registration fee (no credit or debit cards, cash only).

Q: Do you understand the terms, obligations, and penalties involved?

Break glass, pull lever, adjust mask, tighten:
the arrow points all ways in an emergency.

A seat is more than a cushion: it’s a flotation device.
You wrap both arms around it in an emergency.

No need to be polite or fake a feeble cough.
You’re allowed to belt it out in an emergency.

As a child, once, a sudden constriction in breath made me leap
into my father’s arms: was it affection or a sense of emergency?

When a baby threw up clear across the waiting room, she was moved
to first in line. Projectile vomiting counts as an emergency.

We could hear sirens from miles away. A disembodied voice instructed us
to leave our homes, seek other shelter. Where to go in such an emergency?

My girlfriend recounts on the twelfth anniversary of her sister’s death
how she pulled off the highway from a sense of impending emergency.

Breath quickens, the pulse turns restless.
Rising tides find sluiceways in an emergency.

to be smooth as a fig leaf sunning in the yard.

I asked to be light as a circus of speckled motes,
to have the dignity of lanterns on a passing train.

I asked to open like a secret peeling from the bark of a tree,
to close like the hinge of a music box after it has been played.

I asked to bear in my hands the heart hidden in the hills,
for the string to guide me into the labyrinth.