Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Not even the birds speak tonight. Nor the frogs,
the owls. This preternatural quiet can only mean
the animals have tuned in to those high
frequency radio signals that we can’t access:
for days they’ve rolled inland like waves,
ring upon ring of echoes from that gyre
levitating, terrible sufi at sea. I look around
at all the books that line the shelves of this house—

Should I have spent more time outdoors, collecting
specimens to pin to walls, learning to paddle
outward into the foam then climb up on a board,
cutting the water’s surface into points? Inside,
outside— sometimes I can’t tell the difference,
really, especially when holding my breath.

You can tell the third worlders
by the number of trays of discount
chicken they load in their cart
and their propensity to hoard
for that proverbial rainy day.
Why not the 25 pound sack
of rice at discount, rather than
the 8 pound bag? Is this why,
growing up, we had a dozen
blue boxes filled with toothpicks
dreaming in the cupboard of the school
projects they would become? A navy
blue uniform skirt with a hidden
button tab in the waistband and a hem
sewed two inches below the knee—
not just for modesty but to make sure
it would last another year. Even now,
those habits stick: I have a giant
box of beautiful gift wrap paper,
a mandolin with 3 missing strings
and a loose fretboard. I can’t
bear to throw it away: even
the plucked remainders can still
clearly sound their given note.

~ There is apparently no Philippine law for protection of elders from abuse.

The time between one stage of life and the next
seems to shrink most rapidly in the evening.

Here are the dishes that pile up
and no one to clean them.

Here are colonies of discarded clothes
that create an interior topography lined with mold.

When was the last time anyone heard
a leisurely sound under this roof?

When was the last time a room
was a chlorinated vacuum, museum of objects-as-wishes?

Who kept and ate your last grocery rations
then belatedly remembered to leave you a small bowl of rice?

Who took your phone then claimed you lost it?
Who holds your keys and passbooks?

Who asks for your signature on withdrawal
slips, knowing you won’t remember?

It has been brought to my attention that one weekend in August, you fainted or collapsed at the waiting shed and rolled down the hill.

It has been brought to my attention that your neighbors took you to the emergency room, where you were kept all night and the doctor on duty filled out the intake form, misspelling your name.

You are still possibly the only woman I know whose name begins with a Z.

I cannot picture how you fell that long way, cannot believe you have no broken ribs or bruises other than a few scrape marks along your knees.

Cannot believe the people with whom you’ve shared your roof for decades could not be bothered to look in on you or take you home.

The neighborhood council representative takes pictures: you in a wheelchair in the hospital corridor, your thin frame lost in a faded suit jacket; underneath that, a shirt and trousers, each one a different print.

More pictures from when they take you home, because they are concerned and alarmed: trash in the hallway, in the middle of the living room, in every corner. No one around to answer for any of it.

Moss on stones, rain every afternoon. How much electricity can one old woman use in a month? But either the light bulbs are out, or someone has been turning off the power at its source.

There are those who press their faces to the prayer
mat at designated times in the same way monks

go around the villages to collect their one meal
for the day. Something about the body being

a temple needing upkeep. Or a temple needing
supplicants in order to be more than a room

with marble fittings. I listened to a radio
program in which a cultural anthropologist

hypothesized manna in the desert was a kind
of hoarfrost that dried into spongy fragments,

porous like bread crust. Everything that can
be warmed up or poured into a bowl, a stance

against death such that going without
could be construed as a lack of desire

for communion. At noon and in the evening,
neighbors hear the cries of an old woman

who has been left by herself. The moon
makes her remember the jewels she believes

have been stolen from her purse. She turns it
inside out, shakes: only spiders and dust

fall out. They don’t discriminate either.
They slip easily through any crack in the door.

 

In response to Via Negativa: The great equalizer.

~ “Wild Filipino brunch and expertly seared scallops at the new Nouvelle in Norfolk,” Aug 31, 2018 Updated Sep 5, 2018 [name of Mount Mayon changed to Mount Pinatubo]; The Virginian Pilot

when the rich asians in Crazy Rich
Asians do their crazy rich things like sit
for private viewings of jewels in some
hushed and exclusive location then go home
with a dozen shopping bags and tell the maids
to hide them in the kitchen drawers under
wraps under the pile of plain but serviceable
dishcloths and the hinged velvet box with three
bajillion singaporean dollars’ worth of emeralds
or rubies or diamonds set in filigreed gold
is set nonchalantly on the edge of a mirror
who wouldn’t go a little crazy themselves
like goh peik lin/akwafina whose eyes pop
when she scores a last minute invitation
to the crazy rich party pardon me should we say
soiree and especially when all that eye candy
starts parading across the screen buff male
torsos emerging from the shower or sprawled
in beach chairs all casual you know these guys
have never hefted a shovel or dug a ditch in all
their lives and the people in the audience go damn
and why aren’t there ever any bodies like those
working out at the y when you’re there
on the treadmill only old white men in too
tight weird colored athletic shorts like powder
blue pulling on the rowing machine with over
exaggerated grunts and a lady who puts in
a religious hour of stair master but with her
torso in exactly the same position of a towel
draped over the handlebars at the end
of the film boy gets girl or girl gets boy
because don’t you forget she’s ace at game
theory even if she grew up lower middle
class so there is potential there for making
a case for their suitability for each other
but yes of course everything they also say
is true not every asian is rich like that
and singapore is more mixed so how come
the only brown asians are cameos like uncle
who runs a food stall and how much singlish
is actually spoken throughout one of my
students says so typical not to find any
real portrayals of other types of asians
the so-called jungle asians or when any
mention at all is made like in a recent
food review in the local paper of filipino
cuisine it’s always exotic always a little
off always just at that needle pointing
toward wild and one volcano is pretty
indistinguishable from another

“The sea can’t heal the way it used to.” ~ Leonidas Perez, Coetupu tribal leader

There are metaphors comparing people to sardines packed tight in tins, with only a little oil or briny water to lubricate the idea of spaces between. At tapas places, I don’t quite know what to think of boquerones laid out in a wheel next to a little bowl of olives.

For most of my life, I knew sardines only in this form— decapitated herring or mackerel bodies pressure-cooked in batches, whose nearly macerated flesh we could eat without needing to pick out the bones. We ate them mostly in the rainy season, doused with vinegar and black pepper and chopped red onions.

When the power went out, we hauled plastic and metal drums into the yard to collect rain, and shredded old newspapers to start the fire in a makeshift stove. After we steamed a pot of white rice, we could make a game of pulling out in one piece the spines to lay on the side of the plate, the notochord one fine hair stringing tiny ivory-colored shingles. Their chalkiness mingled with the odor of damp mattresses.

I don’t know if I have the right to think of myself as a good person. And I don’t know how to begin to address the question: what is your greatest fear? On the one hand: seasons out of sync; the wide skirts of a hurricane whirling over the sea of Japan, swallowing lorries and airports. Necklaces of fallen bees. Whales ferrying their own dead, reluctant to relinquish them to nowhere. On the other: looking through glut in the produce and canned food aisles at a warehouse club; oil and sugar the smell of an overwhelming despair.

In the nail shop, Vân examines
each of my fingernails under a light
before he trims and buffs. Not two
minutes in, he asks me where
I’m from: Philippines? When I nod,
he confides that he spent six
months there, in a processing
center in Zambales, after he came
on a boat and while waiting
for his papers to clear for transfer
to a camp in Thailand. This was more
than 20 years ago, and he was only 21.
The food was bad in the camp, he says,
especially if you don’t have relatives
in the US to send money. Now he is in
his 40s, married, with I don’t know
how many children. He is having trouble
with the nail polish I’ve chosen, wine
red remaining in a bottle labeled “Sky-
fall.” Too thick, he says; but it’s what
you want. I say, many days I don’t
really know what I want. Next he asks
do I like balut, boiled duck embryo in
the shell, sold hot from baskets on almost
every street corner in Manila and
the countryside. He doesn’t wait for my
answer. He says I cannot eat that, I
am Buddhist. I cannot eat another creature
that’s gone through suffering in order
to become my food. Finally he surveys
his work and says I’m ready for the drying
lamp. As though I’d asked, he offers too—
Anywhere, here in America, we can pray;
no need for temple. And there is temple
also on the internet. Before I head out
the door, he reminds me: next time,
Choose new bottle! Choose another color!
Something that won’t stain your nails so much.

 

In response to VIa Negativa: Guerilleros.

Uncut noodles, embodied wishes for a long,
full life– lifted in loops from the pot

where they boiled to just the right
firmness. A plate of rice cakes

sweetened with coconut sugar. Friends
to share the repast with and guarantee

a future. What harm could there be
in taking care to eat each strand

as one glistening, continuous road,
a ribbon to swallow as a hurried blur?

Better than a sword or flaming torch—
though sometimes it’s hard to figure if this

life isn’t as quick to burn, leaving
imprints hard to tell apart from blisters.

High in the northern hills light falls
too as though sieved through arms of pine.
In villages there, they tell of mist

nets strung on poles that bird-
hunters raise. Crouched on rock faces
in the early hours, they wait with lanterns

for flocks of migratory birds: gray
hooded sunbirds, blue-capped wood
kingfishers, mountain shrikes with

that pale blush of apricot as though
a painter had delivered one quick stroke
of color upon each breast. I forget

what each haul of bodies was for—
I forget if they took them mostly still
alive to sell in markets, or if the lot

of them were cleaned and roasted. So much
work for so little value— though it’s not
for us who partake of a thing to say.