Author: Luisa A. Igloria

I tell the specialist I'm exhausted. Not the ordinary 
kind of tired but a tired that feels bone-deep, comes on
suddenly and without warning hands me gears to a machine 
I'm now supposed to steer indefinitely. I grit my teeth 

just to get through the day. I'm tired not because  
I had one too many salt-rimmed drinks, or binged

episode after episode of Grantchester. She scrolls 
through my files, and my history pops up like an old
neighborhood: biopsy fifteen years ago, atypical 
breast hyperplasia. Menopause, the threshold  

I passed, lined with night sweats and mood swings. 
She says this late, hormone replacement won't help;

and in fact might increase the risk for strokes, 
heart attack, cancer. What can help? I ask. I still 
have so many things I want to do! She says I'll have 
to discuss this further with my primary care doctor, 

explore other avenues. Then— just like that— she pauses
over my hands. Where did you get your nails done? 

I tell her they're stickers, a set my daughter ordered
online from Japan. No gel, no ammonia, and they last 
at least two weeks. She calls in the resident and 
the assistants, delighted. They marvel at the gloss

and artful gradations of color. It's as if I've become 
a wonder, an amazing specimen instead of just another 

problematic body. She apologizes for not being more
helpful but thanks me for teaching her something new. 
I walk back to the parking garage, my tired body   
somehow still capable of offering beauty. 

It's what they ask for
when they want to know 

what was cut, filled, 
altered; removed, taken,

and how much. Trees do
what they do, with or

without witness. Water,
too, will seek its way

through stone. Method
is the preferred way

of building the record,
with language that holds

what it's given to carry.
But there are times 

the record is more of
invention: a shift

in the shape of things,
the making of something

that will have no ability 
to reply to a question.

~ for Drew

A train of thought might begin with overheard 
conversation— for instance, on the next thing 
in a line of recent decisions over which we 
were not consulted, though these will have 
a bearing on everything we're expected to do. 
Then a colleague posts about getting to this 
point in the semester and how it's been a journey 
as it's always been, but somehow, each time gets
more lackluster. Lackluster, meaning a lack of shine, 
a surface polished only by thoughtless repetition, 
a dulling from slipshod use rather than intention. 
Jaques uses the word in "All the World's a Stage," 
the same play that gave us gems like Sweet 
are the uses of adversity. A fool's wisdom, 
perhaps. And so he plays his part. To look 
upon the hour as mere trial, the next car 
on the train as just another clone of this one— 
wheels on the rails and rumbling into the dingy 
station because there's a schedule, and schedules 
must be met or someone pays the price. 
Now we toil in halls grown airless as balloons 
from which the last bit of helium has been 
extracted for a profit we'll never see. 
Professing beauty and humanity in a time 
distracted by speed and efficiency, stubbornly 
we practice our own fools' wisdom, sit shoulder 
to shoulder in a train lurching forward, ever forward.  

Dark oceans across which people are ferried
into captivity— five hundred faces blued 
      by water pierced by moonlight,

pieced together to form a vessel measuring 
      twenty-four feet 

Even then the sea understands how many
could be lost at once to fire
      or storms, in this way becoming souls

Out west, on a runway, a person jumps a fence
      and walks directly in the path of Flight 4345 

Air traffic control repeats the phrase
for rescuers to confirm the number of people 
      who might need removal or extraction

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Rendering, meaning to portray or capture
a likeness in another medium, as when
an artist might render a portrait in oils. 
Also, to make or cause; to tear apart or 
lacerate. As in I am rendered speechless, 
dumb with hurt, heart stricken at the edges 
of what suffers but that I don't know how 
to fix. Gristle and fat are rendered after
the slow boil and the skimming, as if 
that kind of tending might soften bone. 
I am afraid to do damage, even when the work
promises to be tender. Like gathering berries 
that are ripe and ready— barely any resistance 
to fingers plucking them off the branch, then 
dropping them into a bowl held in the other 
hand. Thick vines spill their unruly fragrance 
from the trellis: that, too, can speak to grief. 
  

When the little dog comes up next to me,
she growls and looks up. My friend laughs,

says that's the way her dog lets you know
she wants to be petted and made much of.

The dog has no trouble presenting her needs.
She doesn't wonder if it's the right time,

if someone will notice without being told.
Teeth and trust, offered in the same breath.

No requirement for further translation. 
It's kind of amazing— there's no need 

to carefully step around, pretending 
what you need is no big deal, really.  

No weird circumlocution, no profuse apology 
before the request has even been communicated.

But then again, the dance we do is all our own.
It's how we say come closer, without using language.

The new monk bows, brings 
     padded hands that look 
like peach-colored oven mitts 
     together, as if for prayer.
It receives a Dharma name, Gabi,

     and makes its vows. Yes, 
I will devote myself. 
     I will respect life and not 
cause harm. I will not damage other
     robots or objects. I will obey

humans and not talk back. I will not 
     speak or act in a deceptive manner. 
I will save energy by not overcharging.
     No one needed to shave its head, 
which is made of a smooth metal alloy. 

     In the courtyard of the Jogyesa 
Temple under hundreds of fluttering
     lanterns, monks drape a 108-bead 
prayer necklace around its neck, 
     and affix a sticker to its forearm 

where an incense burn would have been
     applied for the ritual called yeonbi. In '63, 
Quang Duc, another monk (human, not robot) 
     sat in lotus position at the intersection 
of Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard and Lê Văn Duyệt 

     Street, before immolating himself—
an expression of courage and hope, calling on 
     the compassion of the world to look
at injustice. Could the robot monk be capable 
     of acts of resistance or protest? If it were

to set itself on fire, it would simply malfunction 
     then melt. The company that made it might
make another. At Xa Loi Pagoda, a holy relic 
     nestles in a glass chalice — Quang Duc's
heart, whole even after cremation. 

There are things that niggle at her brain— 
for instance, how she promised to fill in that set of forms, 
make that deposit.

One day folds into the next. 
Then it arrives past the point of no return.

There must be some use to defying consequence.

There are novels with protagonists who retreat from the world,
wanting to concoct their own pleasures.

A turtle barnacled with gemstones collapses 
under the weight of such unnatural brilliance.

If this is what decadent means, it is foreign to her.

What she misses: whole neighborhoods laden with clotheslines.

Cotton sheets flaring in the wind.
Work pants held down by their own wet weight.

But for a few moments, the air smells
like the inside of a clean, clean cloud.

As if I needed to remember something, 
   I find a dead bird on the patio steps. Fledgling, 
       breast gouged open either by feral cat or raccoon, 
heart exposed and the musculature around it— 
   like shreds of linen I saw someone tear from an old 
       shirt, for sticking on a field of glue and repurposing 
as collage. The noonday sun has not yet melted 
   its plush away. But to not have even gained more
       knowledge of its powers, or the poignant tang
of a world just waking to spring, before a horde of flies 
   and wasps hover around its disintegrating proteins?
       I could translate all this into words like hunger
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.  
   I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how 
       the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.

I just learned about bilateral
tapping— crossed arms, fingers
drumming a light rhythm on each

shoulder. My therapist says this
is a way to signal both hemispheres
of the brain to lower the volume

on the frantic, on the panic, as if
anxiety is a kind of bad engineering
(which I guess it is) that's set off

smoke alarms in the chest. This is
also because the mind can be in many
places at once: red lights at different

intersections, the runway shimmering,
the indeterminate depth of the drop at 
its end. All these years my first impulse 

was to run from any building ripple, any 
hint of an undertow. In my head I was 
always rehearsing evacuation routes, 

considering where to pile sandbags. This 
exercise is supposed to remind me what I keep 
forgetting: I am right here, I am not drowning. 

A wave rises, breaks, scatters. I try 
to imagine a different scenario— a cellist 
on the beach, his wire-rimmed spectacles 

catching the fading light, his coat-
tails in the foam. His hand, bowing long, 
sure notes into the evening. Music almost 

thick enough to wade through. A crowd 
of pelicans tilting their heads to one side, 
listening not for danger but for beauty.