Author: Luisa A. Igloria

They start talking about who they were
before they became what they are today.

They say they feel so lucky to have made it
out, given how life is terrible there today.

There are no more trees on the hillsides;
only new construction everywhere today.

And the graft! The corruption! Even the dead
can be unearthed from their resting places today,

after their skin and bones have melted away.
Even a mausoleum niche can be resold today. 

You pay to be interred only to find out more fees
are due— for final burial in the soil another day. 

A man hands out shiny half dollar coins and crisp
two dollar bills as if he's running for office today.

Outside, rain batters the coast. With rising winds,
not even the biggest umbrellas give shelter today.

 
A child, soaked to the skin, clears a stopped 
drain on his street until water can flow at last.

The eye of another storm hovers above the coast,
yet no one has been raptured yet/at last.
 
But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spun
candied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last.

Thieves walk the streets in statement suits—
brazenly believing this is their time at last.

Who'll remember when and where and what 
survived, when the trials end at last.

On our very last day, before our departure, 
will there be a break in the rain at last?

(a cento)


14

                 everyone fears midday.
and waiting.

I am writing about you.
If you are looking for me, I am home

My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,

The vision is closing in like a tight dress.

Past futures and future futures
wing. A serrated song with a split tongue of onyx feathers.

What is a nation that does not save

I hug and hold harder and harder

There is a voice and it answers:
Hello, my name is mostly water.
the day could do without

me.

Line sources:
Tada Chimako, Ayesha Asad, Jane Kenyon, Marie-Andree Gill,
Denis Johnson, Morgan Parker, Evelyn Reilly, Ed Pavlic,
Claire Schwartz, Kim Hyesoon, Tina Chang, Andrew Hemmert,
Taylor Byas

(a cento)



13

pure as a body saddled with sentience

Then came the mast of a tall ship
the air troubled above

even an underground sea can be a valley.

I gorge on fragments, always requiring something

The attar of grass, recently cut.
A yoke of beauty. A beak was missing The burden

       The meat a memory. A feat of engineering.

Grey fog, blue sunlight, stones like big footprints

The sea hanging from our tongues. Extinct horses

under a chestnut where edible mushrooms
see the hand's unintended imprint on the shore

In this country, everyone fears midday.

and waiting.



Line sources:
Kristine Ong Muslim, Stefania Gomez, Leila Chatti, Anna
Glazova, Omotara James, Daniel Halpern, Michelle Phuong
Ho, Chen Chen, Grady Chambers, Jorge Galan, Henri Cole,
Joanna Goodman, Tada Chimako, Ayesha Asad

(a cento)


12

The stones, twittering distantly, speak to me

but how do you describe a color
you've never been allowed to see?

If not utter stillness, at least dedication

This song is not for your fight but it is a song
from the dark, landing in the creek

Thank you, objects, for your autobiographies.

I understand. I do. I used to lie back
so much. Let us strike, again, the pose of plenty.

I could have listened forever. But before long the dreams

switched to airplane mode, the atmosphere returned
pure as a body saddled with sentience.


Line sources:
Sarah Giragosian, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Anna Lena
Phillips Bell, Dean Rader, James Crews, Susan Firer,
Lisa Fay Coutley, Rose McLarney, Lynne Knight, Matthew
Prior, Kristine Ong Muslim

(a cento)

11

How a river disappears into the night and is never still.

I asked, have you ever been approximated, does it

matter,

"Here" is just a part of the soul your body shows to me.
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

You thought your hunger mattered

A fig eaten like a kiss in a stairwell. Your lips, potable wishes. 
          The quiet

to feel the flame of breath gutter but keep burning.

And what are your parties like without me?
But if you're waiting for me,

nine little black dresses and a birthmark
as if some vital clue needed to be found.

Let me love the cold rain's plinking.

The stones, twittering distantly, speak to me.


Line sources:
Chi Lechuan, Gillaume Apollinaire, Jennifer Nelson, 
Lisa Russ Spaar, Ada Limon, Paul Tran, Kendra DeColo,
Traci Brimhall, Lee Upton, Annie Stenzel, Lynn
Schmeidler, Edward Denniston, Maggie Smith,
Sarah Giragosian

(a cento)


10

Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.

One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me

Amid the stubble and the stones,
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises

Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.


You       who I don't know     I don't know how to talk to you

something encloses the impossible in a fable
and illuminates what's outside it

You don't see until you're cut.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.


A human is a meager thing
in such immensity, the way a little shoe is small on the stones

How a river disappears into the night

             And is never still

          

Line sources:
Nicholas Wong, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Stanley
Kunitz, Louise Gluck, Craig Santos Perez,
Jean Valentine, Juliana Spahr, Mahmoud Darwish, 
Cornelius Eady, Mary Oliver, Chi Lechuan, 
Guillaume Apollinaire

(a cento)



9

We're skilled at living in the ruins of our cities.

There is shame in it, the craving
for prestige.

Later is more difficult to picture,
And now that the sun is going
the body's betrayals piling up faster each year, 

some bills marked Urgent!
some Immediate Attention!

                                         The mice ransack
our rations, score them with teeth-marks. In the kitchen, fire

the fossil of your stopping in the wax of the candle

Yet the wars continue. In the West Bank
a child blown to bits, playing by the sea.

Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.



Line sources:
Carmen Calatayud, Diane Seuss, Jehanne Dubrow, Olatunde
Osinaike, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Eamonn Lynskey, Julia
Bouwsma, John W. Sexton, Rafael Campo, Nicholas Wong

(a cento)


8

What does it mean to be rootless?

ragged sheep
huddled in the rain

Now the empty frames, the cream of margins
in the way no frame can minimize nor contain horizon

I never feel so alive as when I am

the eye of God is planted between my brow

a blue river flowed above me at night
what if it's loneliness that keeps me alive

That's why I'll never go back

We see around things when we're seeing well

The thing about instability is we rarely see it

we could wake up under the right pattern of stars.
We're skilled at living in the ruins of our cities.



Line sources:
Jane Wong, Damir Sodan, Jenny Xie, David 
Maduli, Youna Kwak, Ashley M. Jones, 
Matthew Zapruder, Amorak Huey, Brynja
Hjalmsdottir, Matthew Cooperman, 
Rachel Sierra, Ewa Lewis, Carmen Calatayud

(a cento)

7

Singularity in passage.

A body of water is, in the end, bu a field
That which in you that was cut

Undisguise me, said the stone to the river

But how long can one return to the sky, how long does it take to reach

burnished grasses, bending slightly, my feet crush crickets, trample

Like time it is everywhere

We love in silence
I think of my mother sitting in a front row of folded chairs

under the silk wind

I have to close my eyes.
I'm alone in the night again thinking
                    
                                   what
does it mean to be rootless?


Line sources:
Marija Knezvevic, Ariana Benson, Rebecca 
Morgan Frank, Brynn Saito, Yu Xiuhua, Sarah
Audsley, Alice Fulton, CD Wright, Bill Mohr,
Claudia Prado, Todd Davis, Brendan Joyce,
Jane Wong