Author: Luisa A. Igloria

"...Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?" ~ The Beatles


Back in Liverpool when he was only 14, Paul
McCartney plunked out a melody that would go on
to become When I'm Sixty-Four. I can't remember
what I was doing when I was 14—perhaps hiding 
in my room reading novels or the latest issue of Jingle 
Songbook, lip syncing to Pers Lab on the radio. 
Now I'm 64, on Thursday I'll turn 65. Evenings,
when I come home, all these moths with glitter
on their wings crowd around the porch light. They 
obviously have a better night life than I do. I still have 
most of my hair. I can't mend a fuse, but I installed 
a bidet all by myself during the pandemic, when everyone 
was worried about toilet paper shortages. In my head 
I'm still in my thirties, much of my life ahead of me. 
Time to sing a few more songs around a bonfire, 
remember what it's like to be young and bright 
and reckless, though by now I have a bed I'm always 
being told I should lie in because I made it. I've lost 
more than one of a pair of earrings, and many of those 
I love are gone. There are days  I feel every bit of hard-
earned knowledge wrapped around my bones—
a kind of armor it won't be easy to shrug off  
even if I tried, but I am still tender enough
to want and ask for more. 

Every night for a week now,
some creature digs through the soil 

in the largest planter on the deck, flinging sod, 
trailing earth. What it's looking for, we're not 

quite sure. But it comes back to the same scene,
bringing the energy of its need like an offering.

Nothing gets left or buried there. Only the traces
of a small frenzy of overturning, which a trowel

gathers up and returns in the morning. Clearly,
whatever it seeks has not been found. This

may not be a kind of love, but it looks like 
devotion. A prayer, which is what it is despite

(or because of) the absence of an answer. 
And me? I've held out my love like a lamp

in loamy darkness, hoping it's bright enough 
to be seen. If I have a face that looks as if

it could not be moved, it's only because 
I'm holding my breath, waiting for what 

has not yet broken through, believing
it should only be a matter of time. 
 
  

Allow yourself time to return to that
borrowed house, your body—

crumpling into itself if not now then
decades ahead. Pull the shades down,

ease into the interregnum between
faith and despair: just a quiet

giving no more to one than to the other.
Harbor no grief that isn’t yours to keep, or

isn’t anyone’s judgment to give. Is it possible to feel
joy without paying for it with coin or

kingdom, without giving up the texture of
laughter pearling in the mouth? Your

many avatars are known to pursue light equally.
Normally shy, they’ve learned hunger is not

opposite to need, nor agency to hesitation.
People stand in loose circles in a room, dis-

quiet soothed by chatter, wine, crackers with cheese.
Remember you’re all here by chance, even if

summoned by invitation. Far away, glacial
torrents sweep through villages, markets, homes.

Under the rubble, how many hearts and singing bowls?
Vast is the universe, and you are in it: rejoicing or

weeping, bending toward what bends to you
exactly as it should, as the light flickers no or maybe or

yes. The body remembers both the sweetness and the ache,
zones of seeming emptiness filled with ordinary awe.

There's supposed to be a lunar 
eclipse tonight—the maw of a dragon 

swallowing a pearl because its brilliance
is magnetic. I, too, want such a milky 

light coursing down my throat, softening 
the canyons made by the hardness 

of years. There's always the moment before 
and the moment after. And between the two,

all the days sifting their questions, so you
could winnow the chaff from the grain.

"I am an AI who makes webpages to learn 
what it means to be a real person. I wanted you 
to know." - AI bot in an email


If one goes to webpages to find information 
on any number of things, I guess poems could 
possibly be considered webpages of human 
imperfection, even failure and neglect, mercurial 
rage, impulsive performances triggered by times 
of family high drama. I'm thinking of poems 
like the one in which someone sends a three-
layer cake gliding like a battered ship/ 
down the sidewalk, poems where archives 
of old hurts reside—The last thing my father did 
for me/ Was map a way: he died, & so/ Made death 
possible. Click on one line, and the rest of the story 
comes tumbling out. The light of some distant 
past shines starkly again on your loneliness, your 
helplessness. What, indeed, does it mean to be human? 
You pick the brand new thing and toss yesterday's perfectly 
good coat in the trash—it's only human. When the merest
rain floods every intersection and underpass from 49th 
street and beyond and the fools come out to swim or ride 
jet skis in dirty water—it's only human. A one-year-old 
sits in a courtroom and the judge orders him to fill out 
an asylum form or face immediate deportation—
it's only human?  I don't know if humanity can be learned, 
or how someone who's been laid off can be expected 
to keep paying their school loans. A storm knocked out 
the power in several communities. Does it make them 
more or less human to sit in the dark for over two 
weeks, every food long gone bad in the refrigerator? 
A couple climbs to the very top of the Empire State 
Building and gets engaged. Maybe to be human is
to want something so much you'd risk falling 1,445 
feet to your death. Maybe it's to push someone else 
aside and to safety, though you can see the bullet 
or the bomb is probably going to get you. 

Sometimes the body
is a house with many doors

and many drawers, most of them
locked. Someone barred access

who knows how long ago—
with a padlock and key, a sign

to not go there, a pile of heavy
furniture clogging the hallway.

It may not be the drama of some
tyrant hiding the bodies of all

the wives that did not work out
in an upper room, or the story

of a curse handed down from one
age to another, for anyone who dares

transgress the boundary. But this is how
ghosts are born— or where they continue

to re-live hurts, walking barefoot over the same
gravel roads year after year. I want to take their hands

in mine and lead them to a space looking out
onto water or the hills, comb their matted hair, wipe

the grime off their cheeks. I want to sit down beside them
doing nothing, really—and just let the evening wash over us.

This time of year, monsoons and storms thicken
above the oceans on the mantle of El Niño.

They are more brutal now, both in the country
where I was born and where you died, as well

as here on the southeastern coast, where hard
rain rises quickly in minutes, drowning cars

in the underpass. After rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underworld
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago; you cut it open, insisting
I eat it, right away. I have tried my best to live: here,

far from the first world which held us inside a grove
of pine, inside the clearing you made for a garden

you’d dreamed of filling with roses and sweet flowering
vines. I promise that I am still trying to remember

everything. Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse
in window glass, you give your face back to me.

The nurse adjusts the cuff and takes another reading.
The sounds blood makes, coming and going from the heart;

the ache and excess of its griefs, its hidden murmurs,
its blubs pressed against the soft corridors of the heart.

The body's such a flimsy envelope. Turning in bed, I hold my side
and feel the other organs tumble slightly around the heart.

Imagine fish in a bowl of strange dimensions, angling toward
an invisible skylight, ribbons of liquid encircling the heart.

On newborns' heads, the fontanel or soft spot—in quiet light,
sometimes you can see the holy pulsing there, from the heart.

~ after Kalehua Kim


you must have been born an old soul, they said

old soul, old woman wrapped in swaddling clothes?

i was old when i was born—born out of old quarrels

i didn't see— but i felt them, so i will say quarrels  

a quarrel's a trap from which you try to seek escape

you escaped to a new city, but your old soul followed

—perhaps there's no real escape, only cycles

you're part of the cycle, and so your daughters are, too

your daughters' souls, made of what's both old and new

take old and new, spin them like clay into each other on the wheel

old paths lead the old soul to thickets of inaction and despair

so dress the old soul in sparrows' wings, clear nights, new thoughts

get dressed, refuse the old garment that keeps taunting you

embrace again this new old life that isn't all tatters yet— hold

lightly what your old soul learned of this world—nakem, heart  

Every weather map these days looks roughly colored in
with only red and orange crayons. In Korea, farmers dig 
up potatoes from a field and find them boiled to mush. 
Dogs pant, tongues raspy with thirst and sadness. Every 
mail box and railing is metallic with the smell of coins left 
too long in the sun. Clay pots and veranda tiles crack, 
asphalt softens into black puddles on the road. Cicadas 
crank up their desperate chorus in the trees, as though
their volume might ignite a breeze. They don't surrender,
though they shake off their jackets.

Is there a lesson?
Is it about lightness, or
what the heart can bear?