Author: Luisa A. Igloria

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.

~ after Mercedes López

I've come to love the milky taste 
of tea with no actual milk in it, 

and the tang of salt in the air on dry days
in the mountains. What are the scaffolds 

on which we build if not the ghosts 
of magnificent cities, whose blueprints

sycophants and tyrants tried but failed
to obliterate? Here is a lattice studded

with diamond points of light, an oceanic 
generation of forests. I want to see 

not monuments but grids conducting  
the hum of a different electricity, lanes

and highways overlaid with cool moisture;
every pewter cell of night cast open.

Human: mid-15c., humain, humaigne, "human," from  
Old French humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging 
to man" (12c.), from Latin humanus "of man, human," 
also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; 
... in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally 
"earthling, earthly being," as opposed to 
the gods (from root *dhghem- "earth") 
                               - etymonline.com



Given a choice to do the right 
thing, what is it that people do? 
At Villamor air base before the former 

president is flown to face the music 
at the international criminal court, his wife
and daughter scream "Humane, humane,"

stalling for time. He's an octogenarian 
now; his health is poor, he's waiting for 
his children, because because because—
 
Police close ranks and bodies form a shield 
but not a weapon clicks in place. His rights 
are read to him, unlike the thousands 

he ordered shot because "Human rights, 
son of a bitch." A milky fog, a kind of gauze 
bandage, drapes over this ordinary day. A dog

limps down the alley. A partly disemboweled
squirrel's plastered on the road, syrupy
rot beneath the traffic stop. 

Fortune can be a fickle lover, 
can be a beggar standing outside 
the gate in blood-stained rags, 

waiting to turn the tables on you. 
It can be a miser who keeps an eye, 
two feet, two hands on his hoard 

of coins because he thinks the world 
is only out to impoverish him. The sun 
shines on his back and on the bustling 

city, but he won't be allowed to buy a stick 
of cotton candy on the beach or a golden 
bullet for the gun in his secret pocket. 

Fortune this week is the despot shuffled
off a plane and into a cell, there to await 
trial; while in the hallway, his wife 

pleads for mercy. Fortune pulls a sword 
out of a gleaming cloud as if to smite 
the mountains and part the sea and all

else in its path. Every blade has two edges,
every sky a moon and sun. Fortune slaps  
one cheek then asks you to turn the other— 

a game it never seems to tire of. Fortune says
this is one way to rid yourself of illusion, 
and prepare for the breakthrough just ahead.  
 

The trains of Norfolk Southern rumble 
past the new cafe. It's the same line 
that carried vinyl chloride in 2023, 
when something overheated and 38 cars 
derailed on the edge of East Palestine, 
Ohio. Think of the rain that must have 
hissed and crackled in the aftermath. 
Of dark plumes rising into the earth's 
free troposphere, as families packed 
their children and pets into cars
and drove away. A couple of years after
cleanup, some people have returned 
but some have stayed away. I don't 
blame them. How does anyone know 
the earth has no more toxins, 
if air and water particles are 
no longer sheathed in emissions? 
When even one coupler misaligns 
and a railcar wheel slips the track, 
your mind runs away with it— You won't 
even have time to blow kisses or wave 
goodbye, in the brief moment of cartoon 
suspension after you're run off a cliff. 
 

"...you are not as heavy as the cup of earth, 
not placid as is the cup of water, not 
turbulent as is the cup of air..." 
                   ~ on the Four of Cups, Rider Tarot



In the card, the man seated crisscross 

under a tree wears a mildly petulant 

expression. A hand emerges out of a cloud, 

offering a draught from a golden chalice. 

In the foreground, three other cups in a row 

might mean he's already drained them. Did he 

not like the flavor in any? Does he no longer 

care for the offer of another chance? Under

its tunic waistcoat, the tired heart looks  

for the hinge in every conflict, the signs

saying it's time to push out the long skewers 

that have turned it into nothing but a plump 

pincushion. Just look outside: someone has raised 

an arbor, started to deck it with flowers and fruit. 

The mascot of my school is a lion; a monarch,
to be exact. Meaning king, the creature who sits
atop the food chain in the wild. Except its statue 
on the quad has no cojones; just a rough undersurface 
of concrete. Is this departure from anatomical 
correctness intentional? A conservatism made
sure the mermaid mascots around this port 
city are flat: flat-hipped, flat-chested, no tit-
illation of boobs beneath painted bandeaus. 
It's not clear when balls was first used  
to mean both the possession and lack of bravery 
or nerve. Decades ago, my ex pushed my father 
against the wall and swore lukdit mo to his face, 
meaning dickhead. We were living with my parents 
and he was angry at not being the man of the house. 
I didn't have the nerve to speak up against this
injustice. Perhaps I hadn't grown my own balls yet.
But really, I had not yet come to understand 
how strength, like in the Rider tarot, can be 
a woman subduing the fearsome beast so it lets her 
pat its head and scratch its chin, while the symbol 
for infinity whirls gently above their heads.