Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The light around the body, said the poet, a field of energy that tethers it somehow to a world full of rushing sounds: a field of noise and bodies— as when you first walked by yourself to market in that little town so long ago, and nearly swooned from the smells of brine and fish guts, long pearled strips of sausage blotchy pink in their casings and courted by flies; and on the ground, the women clasping their knees and tending baskets of wilted greens; a world in actuality only the size of a teacup nestled between the hills, the man-made lake in the park a marvel with its pleasure boats and one-tiered fountain (the same your husband looked at in a postcard years later and said was the size of a duck pond); a world you thought impossibly unbounded, somehow without end, though you saw how sharply the silhouettes of cypress and pine clung to your field of vision as a trick of night before it descended over the scrim of rusted roofs; how odd to find that light even here on the sidewalk, in this park where they have trapped the golden koi in a shallow basin fringed with cattails; and even closer, in the cheap bronze of a cerveza negra bottle someone drank from, before carelessly throwing it away.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 25 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

There is an ache like a shield across the place
where my heart should be, fleshy like a fist
or callused like fingers and embroidered

with floss. Needles track a path around its contours,
their swish adjusting as they push and retract.
See the crown of the oak burning, brighter

than a furnace at the factory window. Hear
the treadle’s slap, the blouses spool paler
than spring blossoms and thin as linen,

from under the hands of girls. Whipstitch and chain,
darts that gather the billows in. The shirt I’m wearing
is made in Bangladesh, Turkey, or the Philippines,

where clotheslines crisscross sky: sleeves and bodices
flail in salt-laced wind— weft of signatures whose
facing edges I’ll button and wear against my skin.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 22 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Here where we crane our necks, walking home
where yellow lights flood the little streets
and alleys in measured increments, neither
can the trimmed points of cypresses figure

where the constellations lie. The hunter
seems merely an old bedtime story: its belt
and quiver and bow, its prey too small
from this distance to see. And that river

of stars dividing the greater distance
between time and prophecy I’m sure
is milky, its edges tinted lilac
or cool blue; and the vessels

that pour and pour yet never reach
the pinnacle of thirst. What becomes
of them when the dark unsettles, when
the lion opens its maw and the bird

flies, trembling, back toward the sun?

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 21 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Walk, said the master in that miracle of waking.
See. Or hear. In this labyrinth of partitions,
the merely unmiraculous voices clatter against each
other every morning. Theirs is the sound of copper,
of coins and cups with their sleeves of corrugated
cardboard. It is always warmer out than in. Or
in than out. On the street corner, where the kids
from the Governor’s School for the Arts are waiting
for the bus, one girl says to another, “Stimulants.
I just take stimulants.” A thread of green unravels
from the edge of my sweater. If I pulled it, wound it
into a ball, how far would it take me out of the cave?
The voices are also breathing. A warm wind blows
over the tops of trees in the city, flutters
like long ribbons of gauze— imagine them peeling
off our faces, startling like fish from the depths.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 19 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

The pebbly look of clouds at dusk, as though washed
limpid by sky clear as water.

And yes it’s hard for me to pass grocery store shelves
bedecked with sale signs, the sidewalk tables

at the corner cafe where tiny jugs for cream
and lidded bowls for sugar gleam whitely—

and not think of you wondering where next
month’s sustenance is coming from.

You say you take a cup of coffee in the morning,
bread, an egg sometimes. What else?

Someone points out the wild rose bushes
next to the broken-down wall, how they are

choked with ruffled blossoms—
everything sunlit, struck, blazoned

as the air above fills with indigo,
even as the light is dying.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 18 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Weekends, on the second floor of an old building at the end of the girls’ high school, the art teacher set wooden eggs and cylinders on a table by the window. Outside, spicy smells of wood-smoke: moldering leaves and dead twigs the gardeners raked into piles under the guava trees and burned. Think of light as a thin finger of ochre you halo around a shape, he said. Think of the angle as it hits the roof. Camouflaged in the trees, the shadow of a bird that looks upon the scene and sees the worm’s dark squiggle vanish into the dirt. And there are always ruins— the remnants of a bell tower in the foreground, the dark sweep of a volcano’s skirts steepling away in the distance; or something Grecian, cool skins of marble chipped in the places where they might have spoken or gestured or sung of flight— veined lip, suspended arm, knobs beneath the shoulder blades where wings were broken off. And always, stones strewn like jewels in the grass.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 17 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.