Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The nurse adjusts the cuff and takes another reading.
The sounds blood makes, coming and going from the heart;

the ache and excess of its griefs, its hidden murmurs,
its blubs pressed against the soft corridors of the heart.

The body's such a flimsy envelope. Turning in bed, I hold my side
and feel the other organs tumble slightly around the heart.

Imagine fish in a bowl of strange dimensions, angling toward
an invisible skylight, ribbons of liquid encircling the heart.

On newborns' heads, the fontanel or soft spot—in quiet light,
sometimes you can see the holy pulsing there, from the heart.

~ after Kalehua Kim


you must have been born an old soul, they said

old soul, old woman wrapped in swaddling clothes?

i was old when i was born—born out of old quarrels

i didn't see— but i felt them, so i will say quarrels  

a quarrel's a trap from which you try to seek escape

you escaped to a new city, but your old soul followed

—perhaps there's no real escape, only cycles

you're part of the cycle, and so your daughters are, too

your daughters' souls, made of what's both old and new

take old and new, spin them like clay into each other on the wheel

old paths lead the old soul to thickets of inaction and despair

so dress the old soul in sparrows' wings, clear nights, new thoughts

get dressed, refuse the old garment that keeps taunting you

embrace again this new old life that isn't all tatters yet— hold

lightly what your old soul learned of this world—nakem, heart  

Every weather map these days looks roughly colored in
with only red and orange crayons. In Korea, farmers dig 
up potatoes from a field and find them boiled to mush. 
Dogs pant, tongues raspy with thirst and sadness. Every 
mail box and railing is metallic with the smell of coins left 
too long in the sun. Clay pots and veranda tiles crack, 
asphalt softens into black puddles on the road. Cicadas 
crank up their desperate chorus in the trees, as though
their volume might ignite a breeze. They don't surrender,
though they shake off their jackets.

Is there a lesson?
Is it about lightness, or
what the heart can bear?


 

~ Amorphophallus titanum

The week we were away, we missed
the moment the corpse flower finally
opened at the botanical gardens.
Its signature scent of rotten meat 
comes from cadaverine and putrescine, 
compounds that attract fruit flies and 
beetles. The insects think they've lucked out 
on carrion, and will pick up and scatter pollen 
on their way out. On our return, almost 
everyone we knew had stood in the line 
snaking past the orchid displays in the lobby,
out the glass doors and into the parking lot 
where someone's child was throwing 
a tantrum and begging to go home. 
They had bought tickets, of course—
one night only! As though the flower 
had agreed to this cabaret, and everyone 
was just waiting for the drumroll moment 
when the spathe heated up like a microwave 
and the spadix pushed out of its ruffled velvet 
skirts to  spread redolence in the air. Isn't that
how it is, though? We jostle our way through 
the crowd, rubberneck at the highway collision, 
wanting to know exactly what it looks and smells
like, this mysterious occurrence called death:
hiding in plain sight, inside life's dark mouth.

"It was the only life I had." ~ Jane Kenyon

Carrots and cabbages 
dumped on the side of the mountain
road, because the farmers can't 
afford to transport them 
to market.

Such overflow of 
abundance, in these days
holding mostly rain. This remainder,
not even subtracted from itself, 
and still it comes to nought.  

~ after “Who Opened the Window,” Jessica Damen


It looks like an ordinary room. Perhaps a summer
house. No gilt decor, just walls of dirty-looking cream

bordered with green. The humid air moves like an animal
through the trees. You would need to crack a window open

though it would probably not make a difference. A man
in a merino sweater, hand on hip, stands behind a woman

in a chair. She is in middle age, perhaps farther along, but she
wears the look of what some might call good breeding.

Her hand cups her cheek so we can see the diamond
on one finger. This means she is taken. Was taken. Did he

do the taking? His face, turned toward the fourth wall between
us, is bored or indifferent. He’s the kind who takes easily, and

after having taken, runs his fingers through his hair, moving
on to the calculation of the next conquest. On the dinner table,

a pewter samovar and cup; a weighted object in the shape
of a horned, eyeless head. I see another woman there—

but there are two. Just girls, actually. They seem to almost
have the same body, though the one who sits upright has a face

still mostly unshadowed. Her head turns away; she can’t bear
to look too closely. The other has gone pale and limp as the beast

forces his girth into her. From what labyrinth has he fled
extradition, tired of the game of winding thread and waiting for

periodic delivery of sacrifices? A small, yellow-feathered marionette,
mouth agape, is the only seeming witness. Yet it’s enough, isn’t it—

a start? A record is being made here. Not everything can be
erased, though it will take time for their voices to be heard.

I filch a sprig of jasmine from a public bush
to set in water, hoping to sprout new roots.

You have to admire the way some plants grow
new parts after division— even sturdier roots.

The garden guides say: sanitize your blades 
before you cut, to encourage clean roots.

If we cut off our limbs we would merely be armless or
legless. To lop off a tail would not grow new roots—

but that's how a lizard escapes. I've changed the soil,
thinned the overgrowth, and aerated the roots. 

Decades now since I decided to make a life here.
Does your heart, too, swing from its nest to its roots?

The tree bears fruit that ripens and swells. What's unpicked
sugars the air, loosens, then plummets back to the roots.

The last color I remember my father wearing
was yellow. He stood in the doorway the night
before he died, though we did not know it yet
at the time. He wore a terry-cloth bathrobe
wrapped around his frame, hiding how much
weight he’d lost the year before. Things seem 
momentous after they have occurred, rarely before.
Before is mostly anticipation. Sometimes, loss
feels like a long-running rehearsal. No one 
can quite get it right. It was a week we could not
have prepared for: the earth heaved from within
to make streetlights whip over sidewalks, 
silverware fly out of drawers. We gathered
in the empty lot with the neighbors, bracing 
for bricks to fly off chimneys, windows to crack
like sheets of brittle sugar. If I am still writing
about this, it must mean I am still calling on
his ghost. The last thing he ate was a plate 
of scrambled eggs. When we took him
to the hospital, the traffic lights kept
changing to yellow—the color of caution,
the color of waiting between stop and go.
I think about him at the store, my hands
hovering over bouquets with sunflowers.
I think about him when there is news 
of earthquakes somewhere in the world.
I can't separate these disasters from 
the wound I carry, like a lick of late 
sun trapped between glass.

Did I read it somewhere, or did someone tell me
the smell of rosemary is the smell of funerals? That
isn't the reason I asked our handyman to pull up
the dry stand of rosemary in front of the house. 
It had become choked with other growth,
impossible to separate— a pine sapling, coiled 
strands of ivy, plants he referred to as "volunteers."
No one put them deliberately into the soil— 
they arrived by way of seeds tucked in the feathers
of crows, in the breath of wind,  the paws of nocturnal 
animals. Their roots, tangled together underground.
In the same way, we arrived with one or two pieces 
of luggage and now, decades later, have no more
space to stash another pot, another armchair. In less 
than an hour, the flower bed was clear. The clean, 
austere smell of rosemary lingered on our hands 
and wrists— not exactly a memory, not exactly sorrow 
or even regret. Just the reminder that any emptiness, 
according to a law of physics, is momentary, 
  
 

~ after "Pag-ahon" by Elmer Borlongan, 2011

Don’t look for a simple treatise on triumph, here.
These figures pull the weight they’ve been given—
see how it sits, not flimsy like an outrigger,
but weighted as a bulwark is weighted.

Nothing is soft underfoot. Water,
the color and texture of beaten metal.
Overhead, the sky is enigmatic: amalgam
pressing down on each flank of the horizon.

The energy on one side is repeated on the other.
Right and left are two halves of a similar purpose.
If there were noise, one of them makes it
by roaring into the wind. Their bodies, burnished

from years of striving. Years of work make
the task almost possible. Everyone else bends
forward, trying to keep the star in the center
of their bellies from falling into the sea.

*Pag-ahon (pag-Á-hon), Tagalog or Filipino for
rising/the act of rising; recovery, overcoming