Author: Luisa A. Igloria

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form….” ~ “The Solar Anus,” George Bataille

The senator takes to the floor and makes another speech. The birds must know something: they tremble the branches of all the trees, and ripples move through the entire assembly. What is that nervous tittering in the gallery?

If, as Bataille says, the world is all parody and copulation is the principle of all things, then the senator is fucking with himself, his mother, your mother, our mothers, the president’s mother who was also a president, his father who was also a senator, also assassinated like Robert F. Kennedy though in different circumstances and in another part of the world.

You know of course that this is not just word-play. In more than a hundred tongues the world over, this is the most grievous insult a man might give and/or receive.

Which is not the same as saying women cannot find a suitable equivalent.

But, returning to the topic at hand: what is the punishment for the crime of extended plagiarism by copulation or related means?

It is at the very least bemusing (which is very different from “amusing”— though not at all surprising) that a man violently opposed to the idea of women exercising sovereignty over their bodies and reproductive health, could have been so ignorant about where women bloggers write about that sort of thing.

We all think we’re so cool, taking those long silver skewers and spearing chunks of bread, chunks of meat, dipping them into the gooey communal fondue pot that is the internet.

Here is the text I am reading tonight. The lesson is to differentiate the paraphrase from the precis and to write an example of each. The next lesson is proper citation, using page references within parentheses. There is an appendix which tells you how to do this for electronic sources.

One passage reads: “…lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator.”

Which is to say, no amount of alchemical manipulation can change the outcome when you have made a colossal fool of yourself.

The man in the mountains playing a bamboo kubing in the fading light could tell the senator as much.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Who was that woman who painted her cheeks with flowers, her hair in disarray?
She walked unabashed in the plaza, passed shopkeepers who hid behind their wares.
We never knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day.

She’d disappear during the monsoon months like mist dissolving into grey;
then when the weather turned warmer, we’d hear her shrill cries pierce the air.
She smeared flowers on her cheeks or wound them through her hair in disarray.

She had a name I can’t recall; I only know it reeked of solitude. Fey,
unabashed, her tattered skirts swept plaza stones with eerie flair—
Who knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day?

Who didn’t tremble a little at her approach? And yet her eyes— steely, grey,
sharper than the chiseled moon— it seemed could size you up, intuiting your despair.
They say she knew the future: her painted cheek, a screen for our own disarray.

I thought I knew who she once was: an artist’s model, an ingenue, stylish, blasé—
There was this talk: of course a lover, a jilting. (What we don’t know, we embroider.)
We never saw where she slept at night, how she fed the other hours of the day.

She’s her own fable, fantastic narrative: lucid in survival, she laced
hibiscus in her hair, placed unashamed bid for what was due: her share.
Gypsy with flowered cheeks, with tresses in ravaged disarray—
Love’s still our common dream, imperfect to this day.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

how still, how still you sit
beneath the ticking of the seven-
headed tree; it’s hard to understand,
but just like ours, those tongues
have foraged along the ground
for leftovers, for milky drops
of immortality. O careless and
forgetful gods, you’ve crowned us
with accidents, spiked our appetites,
littered the way with detours
and false starts. No warnings issued
about sharp blades of grass that split
the ligaments in the mouth: and thus,
in dreams, the restless body turns
and hisses, even in brief repose.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

This must have been the way the world was made: gleaming with wings, hillsides burnished before their dazzle dimmed. When dunes spat back their sand, we wandered through the vegetation in a daze, frightened by broken-off quills and outsized petioles, assaulted by a flotsam of smells, afraid to touch or taste or gather… What wind wrenched away, we’d have to carve back, painfully, by hand. The schools, the corner fast food places, the notaries’ and doctors’ offices, the grocery stores whose shelves were licked by giant tongues of water— What was it about disorder that brought us to our knees? Gradually we remembered what could be done with mud; which crystals broken off from rocks along the beach might pass for salt. It took a while before we sighted birds. The first bright sun came through thick drapes of cloud that looked like women’s breasts. The shore resembled none that we had ever seen before. Someone began to write an almanac of our days— New kinds of growth no longer matched with our old reckoning of time. Someone took pains to straighten a row of stones above the water line.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Find the rest in any pose,
the teacher said: as circling birds
eventually come to roost,
as the water’s thrashing
quiets after it, too,
has had its fill.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.