Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Horizon line, vanishing point, convergence—
concepts first learned in perspective drawing 
from Mr. Caja, my first art teacher. I think

he was a clerk in some office during the day.
But on weekends the Belgian nuns and priests
who ran the elementary school on the hill

let him have two drafty rooms above the space 
where children took piano lessons, sometimes
getting their pancake fingers rapped 

with a pencil. Grey-haired and unassuming in his 
plain jacket and dusty slacks, yet he came to life
in that makeshift studio where on rough planks

he set out wooden cylinders, blocks, smooth
round or oval shapes. How does one learn 
to move more surely inside the outline, 

discern the source of light so shadow can be 
filled in properly? Easy to feel confused as lines
and details begin to crowd on paper, lean crooked

or badly measured. I want to figure out 
the world in smaller spaces, because the too-
real world is swollen if not with elegy, then 

with the detritus of memory. Constant cries, 
demanding love or time or sacrifice. And why 
is it these seem infinitely interchangeable?

But I don't pity the worm whose sights turn outward 
from the soil of its burrowing; nor envy the bird and its 
aerial view. Both think their distance from the horizon

is a kind of destiny or curse until one tries to snatch 
up the other, and the other tunnels deeper into the loam;
and all of us return to the mere but exquisite present.      

Once, buying a pair of kitten-
heeled pumps as a gift for my mother 
(she'd walked past the store window 
more than once to admire them), my
father tucked a peso bill into each 
toe box. Though I didn't quite 
understand how this rendered the gift, 
even if gift, more than just a thing-
transaction, I knew he believed in 
the power of symbols—how they 
scatter potency through life in the guise 
of ordinary things, then transform 
into meaning. Each new year's eve,
he'd wear the same yellow silk
shirt with orange dots, circles
being the sign for wealth and luck.
Every surface could be an augur,
a token of the future, a foreboding:
warts on a finger, the shell 
discarded by a cicada like a coat; 
fish scales refracting light 
like a prism or a disco ball. 

 

  

Parents sometimes say things like I hope
you follow in my footsteps. Or at least, 
my parents did. In my case, the hope was 
law school, because my father was a lawyer 
most of his life; then in the last twelve 
or fifteen, a judge in the local circuit 
court. I was in high school when he started, 
and had learned to type. He was, however, 
no good at it; but didn't think he should
ask any of the law clerks or secretaries 
to type up his statements of decision. And so 
at the end of the day on Fridays, he'd lug home 
one of the office machines, a heavy Remington 
Standard with a gunmetal frame and green keys, 
and ask for my help. I loved the language of 
the law— formal, latinate, nuanced— though I 
didn't always understand everything such words 
could mean: prima facie, incumbent; appellate, 
plea, substantial evidence. We sat at the table
after dinner, my fingers ready to go while he
chewed on the end of a pencil as he reviewed
scribbles on a legal pad. Interviewers often
ask me how it happened that my daughters 
became writers too; and how or if I'd pushed 
them (that always gives me pause). How much
of our propensities— that bright quickening 
to language, those qualities of dark brooding— 
are passed down somehow in the blood? How much 
is nurtured, willed, imposed; and how much accident, 
a hand held out as if to say stop, that's not  
what I intended? And it's true, we look to language
to help us regulate, to keep monarchs from corrupting
their powers, to give expression to both the seething 
and the profound intimacies in our days. Not yet
a perfect arbitration by any means, but I think
there was a time when we said things like justice
and rights and recourse to the law for remedy or
relief, and it felt like we knew what these meant. 
 

Such a curious word— breathtaking. To take
one's breath. Away. One can take precautions,

take five, take advice, take note; take pity,
take hostage... I too am floored by moments

called breathtaking. It can take so little for
that catch of breath in the throat. It's as though 

a finger presses lightly inward at the hollow 
center of your collarbone. And yes, all of us 

have lost and grieved our dead. But recently, 
I heard someone say that those who've wilfully 

cut ties with us have also become as if dead. 
That's the kind of grief I've been carrying, 

since my firstborn stopped speaking to me
nearly four years ago now. But doesn't loss

imply a previous ownership; or if not ownership,
then a belonging? I grieve too over my inability

to lift the longsuffering of others I love, 
whether from mental illness or anxiety or just

the everyday bludgeoning by life. On a train, 
in a coach where the seats face away from 

the direction it's headed, I watch the landscape 
recede as if toward the past. Out here in rural 

Virginia, horses and cows against brilliant 
green; then hulls of houses gone to ruin 

followed by rows of boxy apartments and squares 
of parking lots. Back home, there's an amateur 

telescope which we haven't used because of light
pollution. Here, I imagine nights unroll a dark

that could be truer dark. Nightfall means the onset
of night. But can I also think of it as the fall of

night? The fall of those forces which cloud our joy,
leave nothing warm even in spaces of abundant silence.  

If you’ve frequented those cafes where lately the cappuccinos
are topped by swirls resembling dragons from fantasy novels,
you might have heard it said that Godzilla lives in the center
of the earth. And if you happened to order a Reuben sandwich
with a side of pickle, you might have been told that certain
brands of sour chili pickle get their distinct flavor from salt
harvested from those places Godzilla’s feet have touched.
I used to think this was just the kind of story that’s spit
out of gumball machines with no real gumballs— just hollow
rubber spheres that hide little strips of paper on which some
poor soul chained to a basement wall in what used to be a fortune
cookie company is still writing fortunes (or are they cries for help?)
that are not fortunes, but banal sayings like “Life is what you make it”
or “A good heart is the center of the family—” which by the way
is also hogwash, since we all know that mitochondria are
the engines of the cell. but never has any science existed
that could predict whether you’d wind up in a dysfunctional
family or in one that wore identical smiles and color
coordinated clothing for special photo shoots each new
season of the year. But recently I put a gumball into my mouth
and bit down on a claw of bristly dark green jade. It tasted
simultaneously of roasted coconuts and the sea. 

actively proactive for the self

bootstraps are for tying

call a spade a spade, won't you?

don't pay full price but

eat all you can 

first one to finish

gets the girl and a pre-nup

happy is an old-fashioned state of mind

i don't know that there's anything to be

justly miserable about 

keep your own people in check but

love me those noodles and coconut juice

my mama's apple pie and sugar donuts

nobody's business but my business

o say can you see how beaten and

purple the skies at night how un- 

quietly the colors protest but i

rob you blind and still you love me

suspension states are indefinite 

taxes and other lucrative sources of wealth

u better believe the hype or else

vainglorious (alleged) victors?

we don't see ourselves as

xenophobic

you are xenophobic we aim to be

zillionaires

The way the river looks on windy days 
(we live a block away): white-capped, 
indigo-lined. Along its horizon, 

birds make V-formations, like someone 
inked them fast. The blur— illusion of
the years. To the left, rows of ship-

to-shore cranes resemble those all 
terrain armored walkers in Star Wars. 
These are, of course, for large

container ships hauling cargo to
the international terminal. I know time
sometimes is like a wading bird standing 

perfectly still on one leg in the shallows. 
Other times it is the clean dart of its beak, 
spearing a target beneath the surface. 

Yesterday my therapist told me I should go 
ahead and lean fully into my grief (this too 
has its own understory), so it might 

loosen by degrees. It's waterlogged, tight 
as a monkey's fist or heaving knot for casting 
rope from ship to ship or ship to shore. 

When I was in first grade, I used to have 
recurring dreams in which I hovered a few inches 
above a sheet which turned into a quiet billowing 

sea. I don't have them anymore, only the images 
fixed in memory. But I recognize the attitude: 
listening for a hush that isn't complete 

silence— filled instead with insinuations 
of sound and movement. Isn't this too 
a kind of reading, and the rippling a kind 

of poetry? Yes, I think these are some forms 
that help us. Or spirits, if that's how you want 
to name them. Dreams, for sure. But there's 

got to be something in you which knew it wanted 
to turn its face in that direction, which wanted 
to follow. How else could we have gotten here?   

"For one human being to love
another... the work for which
all other work is but preparation."
                 - Rainer Maria Rilke



Isn't there also something to be said 
about the romance with paper and ink?
Deckled edges and folios, marbled end

pages; the almost-lost art of penmanship, 
letter-writing, sending postcards through 
the mail. I know a writer who collects old 

pens, vintage typewriters, ink blotters— 
the paraphernalia of the writing life before
technology's takeover. Pens overlaid 

with vermeil and mother-of-pearl; smooth 
stainless steel with heft enough to press 
the nib onto the surface of paper. His wife 

is an art restorer. Carefully touched to layers 
of grime on canvas, cotton-tipped wands, in time,
reveal the understory. For both, reward comes from

a light hand guiding the effort through the medium. 
I've always wanted to move in the world like that, and
my language with me— do you know what I mean? Not

plodding through heavy murk forever, but startling 
alive at contact with shapes as they show themselves:
their rust and edges, the material of their bodies.

~ after Carlos Bulosan and Norman Rockwell



Dust and heat, dirt roads. Fields where

     every farmworker you'd see was bent to the soil: 
 
           iceberg lettuce, garlic, beans, all picked by hand. In

Delano, grape workers led strikes at ten vineyards. For 

     each box packed, they demanded twenty-five cents more.

           Immigrant wages in the '20s— lower than other workers.

Divide and conquer, scapegoating, name-calling, beatings.

     Eggplant and curly kale, arugula and strawberries;

           in every smoothie and on the flesh of apples, in-

dentations of that past. Easter tables bedecked with tinted

     eggs, spring peas, asparagus, and ham; and at Thanksgiving,
 
           impeccable tablecloths for a showcase of plenty.

Deliver us from a world which makes invisible the human cost of labor,

     endorses the privilege of some by taking away the rights of others.

Labyrinthitis is caused by the inflammation 
of the labyrinth, a maze of fluid-filled 
channels in the inner ear. 


I threw up into a plastic bag
all the way down the mountain 
road, six hours from the city.
When I was done, my insides  

felt completely wrung. Not only
was I lightheaded— also, I thought
the light glancing off the car's
side window was a sword or

the finger of God. Now I know
that the tingling in my palms was
probably from dehydration, and not  
some fearful prelude to a rapturing. 

Imagine the body rattling in the air, 
in the throes of its disintegration— 
though we're told the soul can neither 
be created nor destroyed.