Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Living is the oldest war in the world. Out walking,
and twilight leans in. Streetlights blink as if everything

needs to grow accustomed to the dark. Hands
in your pockets against the cold— when did you  

learn to curl them close into themselves, in secret? 
People gather in lit-up spaces filled with song 

and noise. You push the door open, slide
into a seat. Here too, while joining in,

you’ve learned to rearrange those parts of yourself 
at once rawer and softer, the ones you learned to

shelter from even joy.  While glad for welcome, you
never entirely lift  your hand from the dial, always 

taking measure. The list of the wind, any draft 
that could snuff out the fragile spark you carry.

*

You walk into this life each morning
as if it was the first day over again and you,
one of the new arrivals to this world. Brush
your teeth, straighten your collar in the mirror,
practice the length or shortness of vowels
your tongue still trips over sometimes. Quickly 
self-correct in front of a roomful of eyes. It’s still 
winter but bodies with skin the same color as yours 
are yanked into the streets in their underwear or 
dragged through the broken windows of their cars. 
Long a, short a. Not pliss, please. Inhale, exhale.
A custom is a habit. A customs is an inspection.
You breathe the indifferent air, you know you must.
Keep walking. Living is the oldest war in the world.

*

High up on my left thigh, a brown mole,
its tint muted by time. I used to wonder
if this could be listed as one of my
"identifying features"— what's meant 
when describing the shape of your nose,
how your brows arch or careen to the left 
while the other lies inert as a tent 
that could never be raised. Most 
of the time I forget it's even there. 
Not something to register, stepping out 
of the shower and toweling off. My mother 
had moles across her back— a page out of 
connect-the-dots coloring books like the ones
she bought so I could amuse myself and never
be bored. Connect the dots, from one to ten 
to fifty to almost a hundred, the age she 
would have been had she not passed away 
at ninety. After I gave birth to my first
child, she handed me a warmed-up cup
of coconut oil to stroke across my
belly. For the stretch marks, she said.
For helping speed up the skin's snapping
back to the state it was before it
was marked by life, if I was lucky. 

The bottom drawer holding sweaters and 
scarves: you can't make it stick, except 
with a wad of cardboard. The refrigerator 
leans slightly to the right, resting against 
a wooden block you inserted between its shoulder 
and the wall. The jagged line across the counter 
panels, invisible until you look under the top: 
like the view of a crooked gap in the teeth 
of someone when they finally smile with their 
whole mouth. There's so much inventory you 
can list of the mismatched, the propped-
up, the almost falling down. Your dream,
when you dreamed of a house, was of floors
that flowed smooth as the afternoon light
falling on them through windows. Rooms
you could almost hear breathing, before
the years filled them with clothes and 
furniture, small appliances that chimed  
or sang the start of the day or the end  
of a washing cycle. You want to apologize
to keys and quilts, bottles of cleaner 
under the sink, the orange in the fruit
bowl and the banana that turned mushy— 
at least explain how all you wanted was 
an orderly life, the magic of simplicity
and alignment. But they remind you again
that this is what it is. And if you are
tender to yourself, you'll hear and 
maybe even smell the rain falling on 
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled 
map of this life which shows you there 
are still wildnesses left unexplored. 
  

I remember Star Café on Session Road, the place
my father and his friends gathered for a brew.
For me, a cold bottle of chocolate milk; a plate

of fries, homework spread out on the oily table.
Waiters balanced plates of noodles, walking through
iconic Star Café on Session Road. Now, no trace

of this haunt that held memories with such grace.
And fewer, now, the pines that fog can sidle through.
Cold beads on a glass of chocolate milk— that glaze

bends my focus to that faraway childhood place.
Remember egg pie, quail eggs in oyster sauce? Who
still remembers Star Café on Session Road, a place

where time moved on yet anchored itself in place,
in memory? Hands moved pieces over chessboards. Who
knew how much I'd miss Star Cafe, this ordinary place 
whose doors swung open to a cold glass, a warm plate.

We don't have to lie when we're incredible.
Believe the way you walk into the room, then.
Take possession of the air. The AC's the lie— 
carefully controlled temperature that lies
between don't melt or scorch. The chandelier
tinkles faintly. Greenery's espaliered against
the wall. But you can rearrange any disbelief
so it shreds like cheap plastic. Saliently
discomfited that you show up in this milieu
(where youth and beauty believe the lie about
their superiority), the jurors lie: they "always 
had you in their sights." In lieu of praise,
a token. In lieu of acceptance, the chance 
to be redeemed by those holier than you.  

Just once I knew what life was for.
The hoarders though, once they got
their hands on it, said once is not
enough. Ones, tens, twenties, currency
in whatever form whet one's appetite
for more and more. For a taste, just once
what would you give or give up? Once, we
lined up for ashes, the ones drawn in
the shape of a cross: reminder that wants
are different from needs, that once this
life is done, one's status and wealth are
of no consequence. Once upon a time, I
wanted just as much and hard as any. 
Once, I thought I knew what life was for. 

He said his aunt went missing 
last week; she'd managed to slip
out of the house when her husband
was at work, and wandered the streets
of their North Carolina town until she 
was found nearly at dusk. She went
past houses with fences, houses with 
boxwood hedges, the hardware store 
and the shoe repair shop at the corner; 
the elementary school playground with  
swings and bright climbing equipment,
the trains carrying coal rumbling 
along the tracks at the edge of town. 
Farther and farther, not knowing south 
or east or west. Her thin housecoat 
must have fluttered in the still-cold 
February air, its flaps like endpapers 
of a well-thumbed atlas, each map in it 
pointing to the only destination she knew.
When the police found her and gently asked
where she was going, why of course didn't 
they know, she was walking home to Guyana? 
Isn't it something— how even when the mind 
is drifting deeper into a fog, the heart 
remembers a place as surely as the day 
it first pushed off from that warmer shore.

Eighteen pairs of eyes fix on me,
or on anything in the general direction 

of the front of the classroom. No one  
actually yawns, though their faces look 

like yawning. Outside, the rain is barely  
leaving pencil marks on the roof. Here,

it's mostly silent. Today the story is 
about a pig in a lab, whose organs 

are being genetically engineered 
for eventual transplant to victims of 

a plague. What does the world look like 
if one believes in the superiority of 

humans to other species? What use-
fulness does sacrifice have in the world? 

The students look at me as if I'm the lab 
animal in the crate, and they're the scientists 

circling the room with clipboards and pens. 
I dearly want to know: what will it take 

to kindle a fire, get them to care 
about stories and poems, warm up 

to metaphor and meaning? Toward the end 
of the session, they shut their tablets 

and zip backpacks close, heave out of their 
seats and walk out of the room— expressions 

mostly unchanged as I erase the board, return 
the matchstick to its box marked "strike anywhere."

We were joking about shadow bodies, doppelgängers, 
our bodies that don't quite feel awake until they 
have washed their faces and drank at least a cup 
of strong dark coffee. My doppelgänger ordered 
a coffee that the student barista made behind 
the counter, but with nondairy milk because of 
lactose intolerance and because though I love 
coffee, too much sometimes trips up the acidity 
in my stomach. Yet I drink it all day long, I 
nurse my one cup of coffee and make it last, or 
my shadow self will make myself another cup at home 
later in the evening because oh god she just loves 
the smell of coffee. I've been thinking of the body 
as a kind of garden, luxuriant with texture and
scent, dotted with underground caves where fireflies
sequin the water. Not that garden in the first story  
of exile where a snake in the grass wasn't there 
to play but brought a non-multiple choice test and 
a loaded answer key. My body doesn't feel like its 
core is merely a leftover rib or an afterthought. 
So many mornings my body might feel like a mess 
of limbs and thinning hair, callused heels, creaking
knees. But I would rather be a constellation of lights
winking at the edge of the ceiling, festive beyond
the holidays— wouldn't you? In the Bolivian restaurant 
where the tamales are warm and the sauce is creamy 
with a hint of heat, my body sinks into the orange 
bucket seat and feels short as a child, but it knows 
it couldn't wait to get out of the office. Someone makes 
a joke or a pun. Can't even remember how exactly it went 
now— divot, diva, treble, trouble?— but enough to produce 
a grand cackle. Funny how little plates of food and a little 
drink of something nice with friends is so restorative, even 
in this little city by the coast where sometimes it snows 
but mostly it floods and likely you'd have to travel 
somewhere to ski down the bright, powdered sides 
of mountains and breathe in the cold, lacerating 
air that says Do you feel that, do your lungs and 
the rest of you remember when last you felt so alive?