Author: Luisa A. Igloria

On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—

its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;

its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprints

that are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also try

to claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silver

light beneath the bridges. Could we claim
ownership of the seas’ republics that predate

our own, the fireflies threading messages
in the dark, the sweetness spilled from honey-

suckle throats on the vine, the fields with too
much fruit because now no hands are there

to harvest them? Could we claim the bright
speckle of salt on the shore, the shoebill stork’s

voice mimicking artillery fire? Orchards before
blossom, seeds before they wake. Hunger

that opens its mouth all day without seeing
how taking is not the same as receiving.

The TV's on in the other room and you hear a talk 
show host ask, Is it possible to have a midlife 
crisis at eighty? There's laughter, so you don't hear 
the guest's answer. Folding underwear in the bedroom, 
you think, Why not? Surely one can be seized even at 
that age by the urge to buy a sports car or motorcycle,
take a lover half their age, quit being the sensible 
grandma and go on an open-ended vacation.
It's not that you want your youth back, or feet 
still smooth and without bunions. But you want
to put down the things you've been carrying so long
without complaint, to hear someone sing the syllables 
of your name instead of the formalities you're known 
by—Ma'am, Dr., Ms., Mrs. If by midlife we mean a place 
where the crease feels sharpest, a place between
everything we've known and everything that's still 
not manifest and therefore a mystery, then there's time 
to learn to tango in Argentina, skydive from a plane, not 
have to be the one to stay behind while everyone else
boards the tour bus. It's perfectly fine to look through
costume changes backstage, pick out something
bold and outrageous for your next entrance.
  

"I shall not lament
the human, not yet." 
                       ~ Dorianne Laux
 

Poor little girl with the golden heart who winds
up working for the rich and heartless, in a house
with a staircase wide enough for egos dressed

in silks and suits: they treat her like she's lower 
than a maid. Beggar or slut, tramp who's wriggled 
her way somehow into their world. Other fledglings 

find their way into her care—the senile grandmother, 
the child who refuses to speak or eat. In the first
episode she finds a way to gain their trust. 

In the next, they're utterly changed, almost 
as radiant as their former selves. Then the music
changes, doors bang open, the mistress's hand

lands on her cheek. We keep watching, though we
know it's all perfectly orchestrated: predictable script, 
the makeup of both villainess and heroine still perfect

after marathon fighting and weeping. They've got 
the tropes and the melodrama. We want to see love
win, see karma find those who wanted to ruin everything 

What do the labels with barcodes mean, affixed
to one corner of each plastic-wrapped tray
gleaming in supermarket freezers? From what
barn and what pasture, from what processing
plant and what ship, through what border
have they come for inspection, in order to be
stacked in a hold? Before landing between two
halves of a bun with a slice of tomato and a frilled
lettuce leaf, what variety of cheap trimmings and cuts
did your hamburger patty subsume? Another day,
another recall— as though it were only a matter
of putting down the fork, pulling the steak or
the slab out from under the gravy and back
to the store. Or throwing away the milk, the eggs,
the berries and avocados, wondering what we’ll
have to live on besides water and air, as clouds
shaped like cows drift through a gingham blue sky.

"The price of kissing is your life." ~ Rumi


You wonder how many times you're allowed 
to pay, knowing you have only one life.

Cooler air after weeks of sweltering. Ants swarm the front
steps, a line of them as ephemeral as your one life. 

Who owns the line of clouds scudding across the horizon,
every anecdotal instant making up your one life?

Crews work overtime during the holiday weekend. How 
to fix a sinkhole that opens up in the middle of your one life?

Your friend recounted her summer job in college, processing
fish in a plant as though that were the purpose of her one life.

Fires and flood, volcanoes waking beneath oceans.
In their aftermath, what becomes of your one life?

Doves call from church towers. Though the world is
ending, you are allowed to wed in your one life.

We came home and saw the wet 
twitch and skitter pattern on tile 
leading to the small and now still 
body of the betta fish plastered 
to the leg of a chair, and put two 
and two together. It must have 
been the neighbor's dog, given 
to sharp barking without warning, 
beneath our open kitchen window. 
It must have jumped out of the high-
sided pyrex dish we were using as 
a makeshift fish bowl. We were going
to get a proper one, soon. But now
this deep blue strip of our sorrow,
the size of a postage stamp— what 
remained after it leaped into the air. 

Not this but that, not what crept 
along the ground but perhaps what grew 
on a vine or on a tree. Not what can't be 
peeled or skinned, not what has furrows 
and bumps where pathogens might 
have burrowed and hid. We stand 
in the frigid air of the grocery store, 
unsure of what we can take into 
our bodies, wondering what the next 
recall will be. Now we are suspicious 
of lettuce and kale, spinach embalmed
in plastic clamshells. Rinsing won't be
enough to banish the germs waiting
to breach the body's defenses. Once
inside, they'll sprint unseen through 
its network of tiny roads leading 
to the stomach, the spleen, the heart. 
The apples in the bin wear their brightest 
and waxiest smiles. Cuts of meat gleam 
in their trays, red as berries and marbled 
with fat. Any of them could lodge in our 
throats on the way down, before they
even have a chance to wring us dry.
 

Summer's over; dark begins to come on 
more early. Some nights I wonder, has it always 
been this quiet? Up and down the streets,  
parked cars in their driveways or by the curb. 
Not a flicker of wind going through the arms 
of the crepe myrtle, only humidity pressing
into the center of your brain, holding like
the thumbprint of some heavyset god. 
Not much going on behind windows: 
shades drawn, blinds pulled down. 
Perhaps I'm mistaken—perhaps I only think 
the quiet means something's never coming back.
Moths keep interrogating the porch light—
so many small insistences, against the stance
of something that won't budge. The trash 
bins wait to be returned to the corner 
of the yard beside the browning hydrangeas, 
their mouths agape. I shut them close, then go 
inside and wash my hands. But dark does not yet fall 
like an anvil or a heavy curtain. Sometimes, just as it's 
about to flood the threshold, a small rift opens. 
And then a chorus of frogs, a choir of crickets.

After the floodwaters              rose and covered

the plains          and valleys                    all you could see

along         what used to be          the river's edge —


a cast                of trees shrouded        in nets 

woven       by spiders             who'd climbed upward

and up    to keep             from dying


Acacia      and neem     gnarled sheen

of the tree of heaven        Ghostly in returning

light           and in the soupy heat 


Like smoke           or veils made muddy 

in suspended bridals          Design of panicked 

weaving          that holds           so they've survived

to turn against its user. The treadmill 
fails to warn you of its desire to speed up. 
Because it does, in one spectacular burst. 
Perhaps there's a race it always wanted to win, 
a record to break? It's now or never. You 
were merely practice. You try to hang on 
to the bars, but a great wind sweeps you off 
the rolling hills that only minutes ago 
you were climbing so earnestly—one foot 
after the other, your timer a modest promise 
that all trials are temporary and come to an end.