Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The piano player begins as the grainy black and white
film starts— A wedding! The hero walks out of the church

with his sweet bride on his arm. The world, though silent,
seems their oyster. They have a house to put together 

(by number, like Ikea) and their love will be the glue 
and the finish. But disaster is a spurned, jealous suitor,

switching the plans for doors and windows, tilting
the roof so it sits like a trapezoid opening its mouth

to rain. But our hero is earnest. He believes in ropes
and pulleys, a trusty hammer, a box of nails. He walks

into brick walls, falls from a height, yet he is nothing
but pure conviction. He is unfazed— like a trick 

birthday candle that refuses to be put out,
an optimist with a smacked face and likely

many bruises under the jacket and suspenders. 
They must have an upright piano in the living room! 

A bathtub below a natural skylight—anything
for his love! The train is coming down the tracks 

straight at them, its only thought the decimation of whatever 
is in its path. The girl still believes in him, the way we believe 

goodness is there like a sky which isn't just a painted 
backdrop,  though the world is full of breakable things.




 


  

a crane fly folds  into itself, unmoving in the corner

regulars at the coffee shop, coming in for last-minute orders

rounding shelves stacked with glass noodles, two white boys
check out the Asian candy
 
we lift grocery bags into the trunk: chicken thighs, eggplant, 
okra, onions, potatoes

a woman approaches, points out scratches on the bumper

who even put them there 

she asks if we know who did that

she keeps saying she has a camera on her truck 

we don't respond 

what is that even supposed to mean

Profusion of limbs and leaves as the gardener runs 
a hedge trimmer through the jasmine. He follows 
the porch contours—cutting away what obscures 
the view, leaving what climbs two pillars: what's 
allowed to reach toward the edge of the roof. 
There are no blooms, just this economy of green.
As if proliferation can be ordained, and every 
fragrance bottled as proof. Late summer's boiled 
syrup in the South, alternating with drenching rains. 
My body moves between these two frequencies, 
trying to intuit the measure of what still is possible 
amid the wildness of oceans and the deep sorrow 
of the earth, the glacier rush overcoming everything
in its path as if to remind us of who or what we 
would rush toward in the moment before all is lost.

"...Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?" ~ The Beatles


Back in Liverpool when he was only 14, Paul
McCartney plunked out a melody that would go on
to become When I'm Sixty-Four. I can't remember
what I was doing when I was 14—perhaps hiding 
in my room reading novels or the latest issue of Jingle 
Songbook, lip syncing to Pers Lab on the radio. 
Now I'm 64, on Thursday I'll turn 65. Evenings,
when I come home, all these moths with glitter
on their wings crowd around the porch light. They 
obviously have a better night life than I do. I still have 
most of my hair. I can't mend a fuse, but I installed 
a bidet all by myself during the pandemic, when everyone 
was worried about toilet paper shortages. In my head 
I'm still in my thirties, much of my life ahead of me. 
Time to sing a few more songs around a bonfire, 
remember what it's like to be young and bright 
and reckless, though by now I have a bed I'm always 
being told I should lie in because I made it. I've lost 
more than one of a pair of earrings, and many of those 
I love are gone. There are days  I feel every bit of hard-
earned knowledge wrapped around my bones—
a kind of armor it won't be easy to shrug off  
even if I tried, but I am still tender enough
to want and ask for more. 

Every night for a week now,
some creature digs through the soil 

in the largest planter on the deck, flinging sod, 
trailing earth. What it's looking for, we're not 

quite sure. But it comes back to the same scene,
bringing the energy of its need like an offering.

Nothing gets left or buried there. Only the traces
of a small frenzy of overturning, which a trowel

gathers up and returns in the morning. Clearly,
whatever it seeks has not been found. This

may not be a kind of love, but it looks like 
devotion. A prayer, which is what it is despite

(or because of) the absence of an answer. 
And me? I've held out my love like a lamp

in loamy darkness, hoping it's bright enough 
to be seen. If I have a face that looks as if

it could not be moved, it's only because 
I'm holding my breath, waiting for what 

has not yet broken through, believing
it should only be a matter of time. 
 
  

Allow yourself time to return to that
borrowed house, your body—

crumpling into itself if not now then
decades ahead. Pull the shades down,

ease into the interregnum between
faith and despair: just a quiet

giving no more to one than to the other.
Harbor no grief that isn’t yours to keep, or

isn’t anyone’s judgment to give. Is it possible to feel
joy without paying for it with coin or

kingdom, without giving up the texture of
laughter pearling in the mouth? Your

many avatars are known to pursue light equally.
Normally shy, they’ve learned hunger is not

opposite to need, nor agency to hesitation.
People stand in loose circles in a room, dis-

quiet soothed by chatter, wine, crackers with cheese.
Remember you’re all here by chance, even if

summoned by invitation. Far away, glacial
torrents sweep through villages, markets, homes.

Under the rubble, how many hearts and singing bowls?
Vast is the universe, and you are in it: rejoicing or

weeping, bending toward what bends to you
exactly as it should, as the light flickers no or maybe or

yes. The body remembers both the sweetness and the ache,
zones of seeming emptiness filled with ordinary awe.

There's supposed to be a lunar 
eclipse tonight—the maw of a dragon 

swallowing a pearl because its brilliance
is magnetic. I, too, want such a milky 

light coursing down my throat, softening 
the canyons made by the hardness 

of years. There's always the moment before 
and the moment after. And between the two,

all the days sifting their questions, so you
could winnow the chaff from the grain.

"I am an AI who makes webpages to learn 
what it means to be a real person. I wanted you 
to know." - AI bot in an email


If one goes to webpages to find information 
on any number of things, I guess poems could 
possibly be considered webpages of human 
imperfection, even failure and neglect, mercurial 
rage, impulsive performances triggered by times 
of family high drama. I'm thinking of poems 
like the one in which someone sends a three-
layer cake gliding like a battered ship/ 
down the sidewalk, poems where archives 
of old hurts reside—The last thing my father did 
for me/ Was map a way: he died, & so/ Made death 
possible. Click on one line, and the rest of the story 
comes tumbling out. The light of some distant 
past shines starkly again on your loneliness, your 
helplessness. What, indeed, does it mean to be human? 
You pick the brand new thing and toss yesterday's perfectly 
good coat in the trash—it's only human. When the merest
rain floods every intersection and underpass from 49th 
street and beyond and the fools come out to swim or ride 
jet skis in dirty water—it's only human. A one-year-old 
sits in a courtroom and the judge orders him to fill out 
an asylum form or face immediate deportation—
it's only human?  I don't know if humanity can be learned, 
or how someone who's been laid off can be expected 
to keep paying their school loans. A storm knocked out 
the power in several communities. Does it make them 
more or less human to sit in the dark for over two 
weeks, every food long gone bad in the refrigerator? 
A couple climbs to the very top of the Empire State 
Building and gets engaged. Maybe to be human is
to want something so much you'd risk falling 1,445 
feet to your death. Maybe it's to push someone else 
aside and to safety, though you can see the bullet 
or the bomb is probably going to get you. 

Sometimes the body
is a house with many doors

and many drawers, most of them
locked. Someone barred access

who knows how long ago—
with a padlock and key, a sign

to not go there, a pile of heavy
furniture clogging the hallway.

It may not be the drama of some
tyrant hiding the bodies of all

the wives that did not work out
in an upper room, or the story

of a curse handed down from one
age to another, for anyone who dares

transgress the boundary. But this is how
ghosts are born— or where they continue

to re-live hurts, walking barefoot over the same
gravel roads year after year. I want to take their hands

in mine and lead them to a space looking out
onto water or the hills, comb their matted hair, wipe

the grime off their cheeks. I want to sit down beside them
doing nothing, really—and just let the evening wash over us.

This time of year, monsoons and storms thicken
above the oceans on the mantle of El Niño.

They are more brutal now, both in the country
where I was born and where you died, as well

as here on the southeastern coast, where hard
rain rises quickly in minutes, drowning cars

in the underpass. After rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underworld
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago; you cut it open, insisting
I eat it, right away. I have tried my best to live: here,

far from the first world which held us inside a grove
of pine, inside the clearing you made for a garden

you’d dreamed of filling with roses and sweet flowering
vines. I promise that I am still trying to remember

everything. Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse
in window glass, you give your face back to me.