Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Near summer's end, I pause 
under the fig tree while checking

for ripe fruit, arms encased in my 
denim jacket to blunt mosquito 

stings. My horoscope talks about big
changes coming with the new moon, 

if I can keep focused at the same time
that I allow myself to pivot when new

pathways reveal themselves. In truth,
no star can know the exact shape and 

scope of what lies ahead; and I don't 
want to know. I just want to hold on to

what light ribbons down to us—older 
than time, but also new and unattached.

In the Ilocano epic of Lam-ang, 
the hero grows at the same rate 
as the plant his mother tucked 
into the soil when he was born. 

Like other epic heroes, he travels 
to a distant town to win the heart 
of a fabled beauty, but on the way 
he stops to bathe in the river. 

Even the grime on his body must 
have been epic—all the fish die,
or at least are knocked senseless.
The thing about heroes is this

expectation that they are larger 
than life, more suited to the epic 
struggles the rest of us would not 
be able to vanquish. I wonder

how many baskets of bitter-
melon he could polish off
in one sitting, how many 
coronavirus strains bounce  

off his super-immune system.
To my knowledge, every hero
has a mother who wants nothing
more than his safety (perhaps even 

at the expense of happiness). Why
do all the books talk about the tragic
flaw of the hero, but never about
the tragic wound his mother has

to endure? It takes an epic amount
of resolve not to crumble in the face of 
catastrophe, which is sometimes called 
fate, and other times just life.

“I love breathing, I could do it all day long.” ~ Stephen Colbert


With one hand I transfer weights 
from one side of the mat to the other

while holding the rest of my body 
in a plank. My trainer says Don't 

forget to breathe—and I'm like 
You mean don't die? I can joke

about this, of course, except
when it's for real. It's crucial 

to take a breath, two, three, 
without even thinking. A privilege

I take for granted sometimes, to not 
fear choking from anything more than

my own spit. To have more times in
a day not constantly thinking about

the water rising, the fire coming, children
whose ribs can be counted as they exhale.

When I went away
on work trips and my children
were still small, my mother
would retrieve from the hamper
a nightshirt I'd worn, or a scarf
I'd carelessly draped over a chair.

She'd line their pillows 
with these unwashed articles, 
declaring my ingrained scent 
would remind them of me and keep 
them from  being disconsolate 
or having bad dreams. 

I never asked if these unlikely
charms soothed their separation
anxiety, somehow releasing
a cloud of comforting scent 
that slipped into their beds,
resembling my body. 

Like everyone else, we bear
the deep impression of hurts
and slights. These graft themselves
to what we remember of joyous
times, stirring in us like the Chimera
from Greek myths— she who is fire-

breathing monster made of different 
parts: golden-maned lion and bleating goat, 
fierce dragon and blue-scaled snake. And if 
she is mother besides, her children's cells 
live past birth in her body and in her brain, 
knitting a garment she will ever wear.

Why is the Costco Apocalypse Dinner Kit with a 25-year
shelf life suddenly trending, when those kinds of things

have been around for a while? When the world is ending, 
I suppose there might be some comfort in knowing you 

could  have a few last bites of pasta Alfredo, pot pie or 
teriyaki rice (just add water). There are at least a few 

moments every day that feel apocalyptic. A geyser 
explodes boiling water, mud, and rock a hundred feet 

in the air. Floodwaters roar through bridges and tin house 
villages. There are wars that have been raging so long, 

we can't remember exactly how they started and when. 
How many WCNSF could a bucket of Apocalypse meals 

feed? Birds fall out of the air but no one eats them. Dead
bees lie on their sides, the broom stiffening on their legs.
 

                        "Love surprises us.
                         It ends."
                                            ~ Eliza Griswold


Accompany, as in provide musical support. Also walk with,
        be with; hand to hold. Your designated person in rooms

claustrophobic with accusation, or  just plain overwhelm. Not
       dependency, more like mutualism. Woolly bats and pitcher plants,

endosymbiotic algae;  pistol shrimp and goby, fig wasp and 
       fig. We scratched out "obey," exchanging vows. Instead,

gave our word: through sickness, health, mortgages, and sometimes
       helium balloons, cake. Then and now, hard to think about that afterlife

in which none of us remain, or only one of us survives the other.
       Jumpy times. You're reminded: sink then shoot up from the bottom;

knife through the surface, blubbering for air, though the world's
       long arm gathers everything back in after reeling you out. 

Maybe it's easy to forget, because there are magical things like flying
       noodles in the world; finger limes that burst open with citrus caviar,

octopodes dreaming in multicolor within the depths. Life laps and ebbs,  
       punctuated at intervals with the effort of striving then stopping,

quieting to a low-key but ever present ripple in the leaves. Do the gods  
       respond? You're careful to make your meaning clear— Not begging for 

special favor, just a decent chance to make good with what you got, time to
       tick off a few more boxes. You're a small speck in the universe. Still, to be

useful in some ways, but not begrudged a go, before the end, at those 
       vaults of sweetness where everyone else is tossing beach balls,  

wading in the kiddy pool, drinking herbal infusions out of mason jars. 
       Xysts lined with eucalyptus and pine, no surveillance drones, where
 
you could walk together. Not coming or going; tracing zig-
      zag threads as if just meandering were essential, because it is.

The afternoon before your surgery I sit 
in this quiet house, ignoring the laundry basket
and the checkerboard of ingrained dirt on kitchen
tile to slice fruit from the bag I brought home 
from the store. What is it about fruit with amulets 
for hearts—nectarines, plums, apricots, peaches—
with a pit in the center of their planetary bodies and
the squish as your teeth cut through their flesh? 
From Asia Minor, migrating birds helped scatter seeds 
of cherry and other trees. In Taoist mythology, even 
just the fragrance of a ripe peach of immortality 
extended your life by 360 years. You know everyone 
could use a little sweetness in their mouths, a legend  
about drifting upriver into a village where time has stopped.

~ with lines from Rebecca Solnit and Ross Gay


Zeitgeist, that defining spirit of a particular time in history—
       a mood that seeps into the smallest particle of the everyday.
You don't understand why everyone is always surly, or why there are 
       bans on books that show life's real complexity (beauty & horror, hurt & hope).
Xenophobia comes riding back into the streets in full view, spitting & swinging its fists.
       Climate these days is more than weather. The oceans are bleached & acidic,
warming at an alarming rate. Fires raze the hills in summer, floods drench the plains.
       Do you have recurring migraines from doomscrolling as much as dehydration,
vasoconstriction, a caffeine addiction? You're not alone. Roughly 301 million have anxiety,
       externalization of historical & personal trauma, paralyzing fear...  So much cortisol
unsettling the system, leaked from tricorn hats that sit atop the kidneys. What,
       foreseeably, is there to look forward to? Solnit says it's Not Too Late. Ross Gay says
The trees & the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the under-
       ground union between us... Lose heart, take heart, lose heart, take heart again.
Some days you just want to survive. Some days you want to die, swiftly if possible.
       Helplessness or frank despair. Then there are days you say Damn it, I'm tired of always
reconsidering before you give in to the smallest pleasure; or even the right to express
       indignation & outrage at the apparent daily loss of collective conscience, at highly
questionable distortions of the law. How did the world become funhouse, Comic-Con for
      jingoists wielding flags & battering rams? Beneath the soil, networks of glowing fungi
perform the sustaining interconnectedness we desire. The largest organism on earth at 8.9
      kilometers or 2,200 acres in Oregon is the honey fungus—it's been around, defying
oblivion even after almost 9,000 years. To persist past prophecies of eternal
     loneliness, perpetual hand-wringing, complete extinction—wouldn't that be something?
Not naive but active hope: What if we joined our sorrows... What if that is joy?
     May we look deeply at our sorrows, then; may we see them in each other.

The house of my childhood was always
packed with noisy guests in summer—
vacationing aunts who played mahjong 
all night, cousins who chased each other 
around and under the dining table. The rest 
of the year, we had boarders—college 
students from Thailand. They wore 
miniskirts and T-strap sandals, and 
taught me how to play Chopsticks 
and Blue Moon on the piano, by ear,
plus improvised variations. My father said 
playing music by ear, intuitively, without 
benefit of notation,  is called oido—
only, he pronounced it wee-do, and so 
for the longest time I thought it was spelled 
w-i-d-o-w. Was this the reason the lonely
singer crooned Blue moon, you saw me standing 
alone/ Without a dream in my heart/ Without 
a love of my own? Drawn into its wistful
longing, I made up a narrative that perhaps 
she'd lost her love to death, but now was praying 
no longer to be alone. Oido, wee-do, how else 
could I explain the ability, in the absence of notes, 
to make music in one's head? It tries to embody 
a whole world of things which are separate and 
distinct from us, until we find a language 
to bring them almost close enough to touch,
almost close enough to pull into our arms.

The lifeless squid 
still releases a potent ink
into our vinegary broth—

Alive, its one eye gazed upward
and its other, smaller eye swept
across the cloudy deep.

What could I do if I had eight arms 
enfolding a beak, inside of which I hid 
a tongue studded with rows of teeth?