Author: Luisa A. Igloria

There are some options
       for dealing with long silence.
Build your own version,

or take life into your arms
as if it were prodigal.

At its fullest point, the moon is so grand 
in the sky: a giant mango bursting from 
ripeness, everyone can't help but look 
at it and salivate. Maybe it's all a matter of
scale, or whatever it is you eat that morning— 
dried fish and rice? butter and jam? A girl
shrinks until she fits into a door the size 
of a mouse hole, or she'll grow until her head 
butts against the ceiling. When a writer 
rises to speak onstage, she removes 
her blazer and we see her bronzed arms 
and back muscles, shown off to advantage 
by the spaghetti strap maxi she's wearing. 
With the spotlights full on your face, everyone 
in the audience sees you but you can't see their 
expressions: are they crying or laughing, bored 
or breaking out into wild applause? Sometimes 
it's good to not know everything. It's enough 
to imagine the stories that go on without you— 
you don't have to pretend to understand them 
or live them out until the very end.

How do they do it, people who talk
rapid-fire without stumbling, turning

(they say) even their own painful 
vulnerability into delightful repartee, 

moments of public embarrassment into 
charming sentences on the page or 

as speech bubbles? You fumble so much 
sometimes, your awkwardness inflates into

seeming oversincerity into false step after 
false step while your mind calculates what it 

might cost this time— Strange, this reluctance 
to confess your simple hungers, the same ones 

everyone has shared from the first moment they 
came, bawling, mucus-spattered, into the world.

—by which we mean something 
we thought impossible, unreeling 

before our eyes. The days too bright, 
the nights either too quiet or 

exploding with earthquake debris 
and the bombast of helicopter

raids. Parents and children torn 
from each others' arms. Then

they disappear. How many times 
do you read the word torture

in the news? Don't say this is
just the way history plays out. 

Don't say the pendulum swings 
hard but it's not done. Don't  

say you can find other words 
to excuse this or make it clean.

It let us nurse it
indoors— too weak to move much
with a ragged wing,
unable to push itself
or its brilliant sails upright.

We fed it sugar
water and small pulp of fruit,
lined a tray with leaves.
One day, one night, not trembling.
Then sunlight. Then halting flight. 

In my hometown, a lady 
dressed all in white walks 
the streets at night, looking 
to hitch a ride. Another rises 
into the air on the updraft from 
her parasol wings. We also have 
a pantheon of gods and goddesses, 
thousands of nature spirits. They don't 
all live in one place, like the Greeks 
with their Olympus. Some of them dwell 
in the forests or foothills of Mount 
Banahaw or Mount Apo. Others wind 
through rills, or smoke giant cigars 
in the branches of balete trees. 
Whatever their shape, they too 
were born out of colonization
when all of us— brown-skinned and  
marked with the ink of centuries— 
somehow turned monstrous. When all 
that was spirit-filled in us was 
exiled, recast in forms of darkness.

It must have been dashed
by the wind against the front
steps, which is where 
I found it: on its back, wings 
limply outspread (one with
a ragged tip). I took it inside
and laid it on a sunflower-shaped
saucer, which my daughter painted 
some years ago at Color Me   
Mine. I wasn't sure it was alive,
until I saw its feelers feebly
waving. So we carefully dropped
some sugar water around the rim 
and brought it over to the window
where afternoon sunlight might
shed some warmth. Two of its legs
were missing— If we were gods, 
perhaps we'd breathe upon the lost 
or broken parts, enough so it could 
hoist its checkerboard wings then 
circle our heads before rejoining 
the world outside— but not before 
taking one last bit of persimmon 
pulp: such a small portion of what 
we need as part of this living web. 

My student shows pictures of two 
shapes on a slide: one spiky and 

shuriken-like, a ninja star that might 
be used as distraction, to inflict 

poison or a minor wound. The other has 
juicy, rounded edges, somewhat resembling 

the poppy which is the signature of 
a famous Finnish designer. One of these
 
is Kiki and the other Bouba, used in cross-
cultural language research since the 1920s. 

But have you ever been in a situation in which
all you work so hard to do seems to merit 

only Kiki sounds, every day? They sputter
from the mouth of the fault-finding boss, 

who can't even remember what she said
yesterday. Not even the smallest Bouba-

shaped grace note crosses her lips. She
probably wouldn't know one if she saw it.

I think about her and the word slap 
when a roach skitters across linoleum tile, 

antennas, forelegs, hind legs bristling. Outside, 
Kiki-shaped leaves begin to change color. Then 

they fall, pointy fingers splayed out against 
the sky's round basin of cool, metallic blue.  

 
of the oldest church on Bantayan island.
It was built in 1839, in Spanish times,

with coral-flecked stones that local
fishermen mortared with a paste of lime,
water, sand, and egg whites. This  

has always been a country of calamities 
both natural and human-made: every  
typhoon a dervish unhinged, every road 
 
and bridge swept away by floods let loose 
as pockets of politicians fill with obscene 
gain. Perhaps we've put too much trust 

in catechisms of reward in some afterlife. 
Perhaps we keep turning the other cheek 
for the same hand to slap again. 

Mouths open in ejaculations— O God, why 
have you abandoned us? —short, spontaneous 
prayers flung skyward (but also, the release 

of semen— milky, viscous liquid that can bind 
one body to another). When we say history,  
then, we also mean the chronicle of every 

tremor felt in time. Gulfs breached, 
channels entered; flags planted in the sand. 
Plaster saints, halos flickering in the fire.

The little food delivery robot pauses
on the corner of campus to cross the street. 
     Its body is a white rectangular box the size 
of a child's toy wagon. It has a lid that locks, 

ultrasonic sensors, a curb-climbing system,
a message flag. Czech writer Karel Čapek's 1920 
     science fiction play "R.U.R." was the first 
to use the word robota, Slavonic for servitude

or forced labor. Slave, in other words. A company 
creates a cadre of robota from organic matter— the play 
     describes vats of bones and brains, funnels with 
skin; nerves, arteries, intestines (whose?) 

and soon, the world economy is fully robot-based. 
But just like in many fantasies about artificial life, 
     the robots turn against the humans, until only one 
is left: the clerk of works, who works with his hands 

like a robot. What happens next? The human clerk
tells a pair of gendered robots that they are 
     the new Adam and Eve, and must go forth 
to remake the world. One problem: they don't

have the formula for manufacturing more of
themselves. I saw an ad in which delivery 
      robots, named after interplanetary
spacecraft, deliver factory samples as well

as food orders. One cuts through a brick court-
yard, leaf-dappled. Another runs along a raised
      path perhaps with a tray of broccoli and
beef while below, sheep run through a field.