Category: Guest Authors

how for years I was taught:
fly low under the radar.
Luisa Igloria, “Only“

Amish quilters made intentional mistakes
because only God can craft
items of perfection.

I make mistakes without precision,
scattering them across my work
with great abandon, as if to ward
off evil spirits.

Those spirits will move
on to haunt those who are too proud
of their precise stitches, their perfect
children, their houses ready to grace
the cover of glossy magazines.

I fly under the radar
of every evil spirit with my chaotic
collection of art supplies spread
out across every surface, children frolicking
in paint or mud.

But my children get their nightly baths
before being tucked into beds with bright
quilts with crooked seams. I will tell
them one last story
about the woman who abandoned
the neatness of numbered columns
for the spatter of paint and the magic
of fairy cakes in the overgrown garden.

Only a radio soap, a knife imagined,
a sound effect, tense rush of air,
but as it’s playing out the sky grows dark
and thunder roars from way too close,
a memory rises of just such a kitchen knife
wielded in temper and with wild threats,
imagining becomes remembering…
the glinting blade… my mother’s house
on New Year’s Eve… so many, many
years ago, but trauma has a long half-life.

In response to Luisa Igloria’s “Only.”

The Archers  See here.

thunder roars  In London a brief but dramatic thunderstorm erupted just as the stabbing episode came to an end at 7:15 pm last Sunday.

in Filipino it means “fan,”
the same thing in Basque
a ream of paper, card stock,
hand-painted, or short roll of cloth,
even of Belgian lace, folded
these many times and bound
to an armature of
bamboo or sandalwood
that allows for the abaniko’s
unfolding, folding,
opening and closing like
a peacock’s tail

how evocative the abaniko is
of old Latin Sunday masses
when my mother and her aunts,
their heads covered with black veils,
their missals open, fanned themselves
while the priest rambled on

the word “fan” does not
quite capture the slight
breeze the abaniko
summons nor the imagined
sound of castanets clicking
as a flamenco dancer prepares
to enter center stage

In response to a writing prompt from Luisa A. Igloria:

On the unusual sea creatures site that I found, the Pink See-through Fantasia is described thus: “Its name makes it sound like a piece of sexy lingerie, but don’t be fooled: The pink see-through fantasia is a sea cucumber, found about a mile and a half deep in the Celebes Sea in the western Pacific (east of Borneo).”

Select the name of an unusual object or creature from a source of your choice (botany? anatomy textbook? geophysics text? plumbing manual?) Write a poem about a person/experience that might come to mind from this first trigger provided by the suggestive quality or sound of this name.

I.

I walk through the corridors of my self, tricked
out in ego uniform. I trail the end of a night-

stick along the vertical bars separating me into
isolated cells to contain my many selves I have

judged unready to be seen in public, ones rumored
to have erred, others likely to appear inadequate.

In order to keep so many confined here to my own
private Alcatraz, the ego-guard in charge of them

can also never be off-duty, never has permission
to take a break, to rest, relax the tense knots,

the kinks that over-vigilance works into muscles,
into sentences, into nights that might otherwise

hold sleep and starlit dreams. I have lost track
which of my voices was confined to isolation when,

how long each has been down here, and for what
offense against the relentless despot in my head.

II.

And here the despot comes! Flanked by pretensions,
he descends partway down the metal stairs into

the darkness of the prison, come to announce his
latest plans for all the inmates, how they might

earn the right to see the light of day and breathe
fresh air again. But first, they must make their

obeisance and express their willingness to work
as conscript labor on the despot’s latest project.

III.

The nightstick dragging on the bars is a mallet
pounding on a xylophone. Taken alone, each note

is sharp and harsh, but as each one hangs sullen
in the air, other notes gather near it until

the tones are stacked and sandwiched like shades
of colored light, a chord of rainbow, sundogs.

“…one chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language; and every

chapter must be so translated…” Slowly, one
after the other, the inner inmates turn their

faces toward the despot. His mouth still shapes
commands, but any sound he makes is drowned by

these new harmonies blending from the cell-bar
xylophone notes. The air begins to vibrate with

hope, tones soften from xylophone to marimba,
are sustained in shimmers, promises, and inner

whispers that race from cell to cell until all
voices in me are raised in affirmation: there

are no mistakes and no mis-givings, and nothing
but nothing only nothing remains hidden forever.

In response to Joseph Lisowski’s “Shadow Self/Dante Dream 10-13” and Dave Bonta’s “Surveillance Society,” with help from John Donne.

Prompt 1: Take a draft or poem that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Unstitch from what isn’t working. Step away and refocus. Begin again.” Luisa A. Igloria, “A Poetry Prompt a Day: NaPoMo 2016”

in the beginning is a list of nations
of the world followed by their capitals:
Afghanistan, Kabul;
Albania, Tirana;
Algeria, Algiers;
Andora, Andorra la Vella
all the way to Yemen, Sanaa;
Yugoslavia, Belgrade;
Zambia, Lusaka;
Zimbabwe, Harare

where others may see in their minds’ eyes
beauty queens in swimsuits with sashes diagonally
draped across their voluptuousness,
in my geography lesson i roll those
countries’ names and capitals in my mouth,
taste them on my tongue like savory
and salted flesh seared to medium rare

thus did my yesterday begin, redolent of burnt wood, crackly paper,
a tinderbox of a building exploding on All Fools’ Day,
thus did our yesterday end with a volley of gunpowder meeting defiant
farmers’ flesh on the dry plains south of my country’s Manila

…my chief joy
is to buy a virginal book
Dave Bonta, “Booklover“

and joy arrived, taking me partly by surprise,
i who once said i hate surprises
unless it is i who is springing it on you
with joy came peace,
the kind i can still measure
in the tangible form of forgotten books
re-opened on an unhurried day like this,
joy in hearing the distant, elusive notes
of piano music from the neighbor’s
on a sultry Friday afternoon
when yielding to a siesta
is the most inconsequential
and venial of sins

There are music schools now in every strip mall;
and rows of silent windows in the old convent
from which piano scales used to pour at dusk.
Luisa A. Igloria, “Your Cinema Paradiso“

how long ago was it when i ran young, chubby fingers
across the keyboard and sought out “Blue Moon,”
asked if an older cousin and i could do four hands
on grandmother’s upright trucked to Baguio in the late fifties?

relearning to play the piano in my twenties,
i wanted “Moon River” or Satie’s “Gymnopaedie”
to fill afternoons of practice but the teacher insisted on scales
until quills i grew on my skin at the thought of scales,
and the piano and i abandoned one another.

today you can find me in concert halls,
there we can moon all we want,
embrace with the force of a lover’s longing
what was lost and eventually found.

Even then there is one more matter

of not knowing: among the wrinkled
pods pushed into the soil, which

will tendril into vine, and which
burrow into loamy forgetting.
Luisa A. Igloria, “Obscurity”

We have saved the seeds
from the one poblano pepper
that the season gave us.
We plant them in pots,
but the seedlings that poke
through the soil
soon reveal themselves to be weeds.

The herbs that should take over
the yard do not. The mint withers,
and the basil falls prey to the bacteria
that spots the leaves to inedibility.

Meanwhile, in the front flower box,
among the dead petunias, an exuberant
tomato plant pushes toward the sun.
Where did it come from?
A polluted potting mix?
A rotting tomato chucked into the compost,
seeds sprouting in the dark unknown?

We eat our tomato sandwiches,
the only harvest from the season’s spoils.
No sandwich ever tasted better,
the only one from this year’s garden.