Author: Luisa A. Igloria

When a former grad student who attends
the same church in your parish mentions 
he hasn't seen you lately on Sundays, you say 
after three years of pandemic isolation and 
the resulting germaphobia, plus the heaviness
of each day in the world, it's just harder to come 
back. For lesser sins (like eating breakfast before 
mass yet taking communion anyway, then chewing 
the body of Christ), you used to be afraid your soul 
would char in the eternal barbecue of hell, or languish 
in the triage station called purgatory, someday to be 
extracted like a dented plush toy out of a claw machine, 
but only after the right number of prayers for your 
salvation are dropped into the coin slot by people 
you don't even know. So now, maybe you're only a little 
surprised at how matter-of-fact you feel: it is what it is. 
In Sunday school, the nuns used to say, imagine 
your soul after baptism: a luminous white, like new-
fallen snow across an entire city. No surface runoff, 
no dust, grime, or mud; not even the herringbone 
tracks left by birds nor the flower-petal prints 
of light-stepping foxes. But snow melts, rain falls, 
swells into flood. Houses and bridges go under. 
In autumn, your mother dies; then a friend, 
and a friend of that friend. Fires rage, bombs 
fall; wars never seem to end. You can't imagine
how many prayers are sobbed at each site of ruin
or howled into the cold, clear naves of night. 

"The higher the temperature of a body, the more radiation it emits."         
                                                                                         ~ Wikipedia


        All day, we try to keep alive some small  
flickering in our cupped hands, in our mouths, our
        breasts. The sun drops earlier now, and this

country is streaked again in shadow. But when
       have we ever lived, really, in an absence of darkness?
This is no holiday, but the neighbor at the end of the street

       has unfurled the largest flag across her front porch—
it looks so smug, especially the red and white parts
       above the flower boxes, an idea of self made

even more visible for its refusal to remember certain
       truths in history. Which is to say, the archive
is full of instances when light was reflected, refracted;

polarized, diffracted, scattered. But also transmitted, 
        as the world is still filled with light-emitting bodies. 

Made two loaves last night to keep from cratering.
Laid them side by side in a pan: love, and being alive.

Never sure if the yeast is good until it foams
in warm, sugared water— then you know it's alive.

Measure and sift, add the liquid, knead and proof.
Floury fingers test the mass to see if it's alive. 

Feed the loaves to the heat; watch that they don't
burn. Things must be endured in this being alive.

What to do with what you made? Slice, share—
any small happiness and grief, like being alive.

O for a windfall of care, to take us through
            the unkindness of days. The kind of care

not afraid of touch, not afraid to come close,
            you know? To ask Are you OK? Maybe

even to hug. The world is full of hard things 
           no one wants to talk about, even if we

really wish we could just let the moment lead
          from the cultivated labor of surfaces to

the awkward surrender of our innermosts. I wish
           we could sit without fidgeting, talk without

thinking of the quickest escape. Let's tell each 
           other, before they skitter like rocks into a well,

what words we've had to invent sometimes, to signal
           that we want to talk about love or being alive.

I am fond of them, love the way they flock 
to the light by the porch, any lantern left

on the patio, the one window which looks
like an orange stamp in the corner of any

dark envelope of a house. Their circling
is insistent; is trance, is lyric in search

of reassuring refrain. Moss darkens 
the backs of trees, so even in daytime, 

they look like they are signalling some
marbled meaning from underneath

the earth. We should be so lucky to be
streaked by their dust—a windfall, when

otherwise the world is over-careful.
Not touching. Not coming too close.  

When is it a haunting, and when a premonition?
I feel more haunted by the ghosts of the present
than the past. Some have stopped responding

when I call; and there are those that message or
text at all hours. After I get off the line with them, 
I am nearly always doubled over with sadness;

their voices carry so much suffering, and I am 
skewered by my inability to make their pain 
go away. This is how I know the ancestors 

do not become gods or angels when they 
pass from our midst— rather, we are warp and
woof in a fabric stretched and threaded through

with our shared griefs. But o, for a hundred moth-
mouths, to work on a rending that admits more light.

Tensile line, tether— you marvel at how surely
          a spider sends forth filament after filament
and swings its whole body weight into empty 
         space. How do you learn to be brave like that,
learn to trust that something set loose could still
        keep from flying off into the void? You put on
another pair of socks, pour water into the kettle,
        wait for it to boil. And I write “you,” though we  
know it’s just another way we try to keep some
        distance from the self, especially when it looks
at itself and feels too close. But yes,  I’m writing about 
       myself, now;  writing of how sometimes I can’t tell 
a window from a door, can’t tell the difference
       between premonition, undercurrent, a haunting.
 

Trembling, fault lines run through 
everything. You don't see them, but
you know they're there. A yellow chorus 
of sunflowers shouts from the hills; 
the smell of woodsmoke pulls apart 
the curtains. Your heart lies inside a pile 
of bedclothes when it's hard to get up 
and walk outside again into the world. 
It regards the quiet industry of a spider 
and marvels at how surely it sends  
forth filament after filament into 
empty space. How do you learn 
to be brave like that, learn to trust 
that something could carry you?

Flowers and votives attract the souls of the departed; 
and bowls of food, glasses of their favorite drink. 

Flying creatures draw near—wings like stained 
and soldered glass; feelers that curl and uncurl. 

Across thousands of nights they've hovered, 
spellbound by light, trying to sort blue from silver,

broken glass from the startling sheen on bellies 
of fish. You no longer want to believe in endings— 

Years after a fire razed a building to the ground, 
you find a creased photograph in a sheet of plastic, 

the shape of a foot still molded to a tattered 
curve of leather. What you are, what you 

become; what remains after you've stopped 
trembling—Fault lines run through everything.
 

The way we read from left to right, from top
to bottom of the page. The way buttons 
fasten differently on men's versus women's
shirts. Houses on one side of the street
are even-numbered, and on the other, odd.
Surely there was a time before someone
decided only men could inherit property 
or go to school, before someone thought it
best to walk or drive on the right side of
the road. Wise men are always saying things
like soup is supposed to come before the main 
course, and breakfast is between 7 and 9 AM. 
What is the right mood to wear over the rest
of the day? Life has no script for the way
ligiht falters, nor for the kind of rain that should
have fallen for this time of year. The river 
rose only so high many years ago. Yesterday 
it decided to buck its own conventions.