Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

She used to keep a tall cabinet with glass doors,
filled with special occasion dresses. Most of them,
she sewed herself. From her I learned bateau and
keyhole neckline, peplum, organdy, linen, voile—

The treadle conveyed the body’s weight, the energy
of the motor to the hand wheel and the presser foot.
The bobbin winder and the spool fed stitches
through the needle plate. Childhoods were made

of buttonholes cut through cloth and edged
by hand, one patient stitch at a time.
Deaths were panels of black, month after month
for a year. White, black, charcoal, grey,

then the range of hues between. Feelings
thick as paint, matte and glossy. Low
ceilings across which the light flickered
tungsten yellow as if through old lace,

gray anvil of days on which the tedium of monsoon
months is hammered. I cannot throw away the smallest
bit of good muslin or truthful strip of leather,
each scrap wanting only to be loved and used again—

In response to small stone (198).

the throat constricts, prepares for singing—
It isn’t easy, this business of remembering:
naming the victims, counting the limbs, counting,
always counting; doing the work of matching
letters, numbers, captions, to the fading
images on microfilm or photograph. Sorting
in the archive, sleep-deprived, the dreaming
mind faces horror after horror, re-living
nightmares of lynching, burning, flooding,
bombing, raping, shooting— Not even the sleeping
dead refuse this mandate: even they are rising,
pulling at sheets. Rending threads, unwinding,
they make us speak or sing: demanding, demanding—

In response to thus: new year's resolutions: sing.

Baked goods and bread, biscuits and ladyfingers. Who taught us they start to spoil as soon as they’re exposed to air? S was the first to rape her followed by the juvenile and then A. Bone marrow, bus driver, then later a second time. This will not rise. The yeast is too putrid, or too cold. Later, when she lost consciousness, there was another time. Another time. They’ve sifted her ashes and scattered them. Sacred river with muddy waters on whose banks so many bodies have blazed to the afterlife. Birds’ wings anointed with ash. Her father said she used to stop for a sweet on the way to school. The shopkeeper always relented. Ah what is a child but the sweetness of a hope before it vanishes like a dark stone into the depths of the gut? With his bare hands. With his bare hands he pulled them out. Fix this clearly in your mind as you approach the fire. Do not scald the milk, the delicate skin on which this spore should flower into nothing less than a thousand points of her name.

In response to Via Negativa: Palpable Beef and News: Youngest gang-rapist....

“…Time running like a chain stitch, a sovereign without an heir.” ~ seon joon

Fevered, I ran through a dream without waking,
panicked there was no way to return to un-dreaming—
Butterflies beat in the wake of my going
which became indistinguishable from my coming—
How does one complete tasks that are waiting
if caught in a dream without waking—
How does the dreamer unpin from its weaving
the wing of thought from only inward-turning?

In response to thus.

Plummet of heart to foot-sole—

Of wing to thinnest skin,
blue strip of still
flowing water—

O for the countless times
I’ve tumbled through that hole
in the floor—

Gold tassels and cord,
billowing skirts, curtains
I thought surely curtains—

Down and into the sooty
dark, so far so far
I thought—

Bring me a measure
of that square of paper
where someone’s drawn

a constellation,
string rosy with knots
of light on which I hoist

myself up and up
as all things must
obey what comes

after the fall

In response to Via Negativa: Dropping.