Author: Luisa A. Igloria

You can still reassemble the ghost

             whose hand parted the gauze nettings at night,

wanting one last touch—an ivory key, soft

            whirr of a cab engine waiting its summons;

a lamp post shrouded in bridal veils

          of palest wings. When you are conjuring 

a ghost, you search through the kitchen

          for acceptable offerings: a tin of luncheon

meat, a dimpled orange, a pour of Calvados

          in a shot glass. What you are hungry for in this

life, you can be hungry for in the next. Press

           a coin into its hand when it comes calling.

Remember to tear off the broiled wing at 
           
            the joint, pinch the boiled rice into a small hill. 

Here is the library of my longings,
said the philosopher, gesturing 
toward stacks of books still unread.  

In the yard, a stony
plot of irises that bloomed earlier
in the season—only their brown

gauze wrappers left on softened
stalks. This is how desire works 
after its forthright articulation.

where divorce is still illegal,
now they are trying to pass a bill
that will allow the married to unshackle
from unhappiness, from pummeling neglect,
from abuse and the thousand other ways
that kind of union dies, with no prospect
of real rehabilitation. Decades ago,
I tried to follow the advice I was given:
hire a lawyer; at least seek an annulment,
pay in order to be taken seriously.
The priests sat in their sanctuaries
drinking rare wines stored in their cellars
and eating dinner prepared by women
they hired from the villages. The lawyer
who was supposed to be working for me
did not hide his annoyance when I was
overcome with tears, which was often.
But he pocketed the fees and even
asked for an adjustment to cover travel,
though we lived in the same city.
At that time, my case did not,
as they say, prosper.

It's as if every season, she forfeits 
one thing more for the dead

trees' return to life, for the ice to thaw 
so the bluegreen blood of cuttlefish 

can pulse again through their 
three hearts. No one ever asks 

how many times she has had to do it— 
or what's collected as ransom each time, 

a hundred times, no, a thousand or more, 
for the god in the underworld— that bruiser 

and extortioner—to release his claims on 
the daughter. Was she like that once,

herself; and who paid her price? Now  
that she's the one who does the supplicating,  

she would like to disappear where a line bisects 
the sky at the place where the land seems to end. 

You blush in front of the cash register 
in the split second you forget the numbers 

corresponding to your phone 
and store membership, so you can claim 
the day's special on butter or eggs. 

When you tell this story,  you're consoled:
you don't really call your own 

number. Why would you need to remember?
Who can say whether the soul wants to drift
closer to the heaven it's been taught to believe,

or back down into the river of undifferentiated
life? Flags flutter on the fringes of consciousness

like riddles whose colors signal to a previous life.
The word for jasmine is the same as its scent
is the same as its shadow strung around your neck.

When you are lost, you stay in one place until 
something shimmers to signify the light has changed.

Along the highway, green-winged cicadas
splayed themselves like fingers on car windows.  

They, too, are working out their own
questions of return. 

What of another life do they remember,
and if they do, what is the brightest point?

Like everyone else, I move not only
at my own pace, but at the pace the world dictates.

LIke everyone else, I have been sometimes
a wanderer, sometimes the ache for a fixed point

which is no longer there. We approach the middle 
of the year, after which we can say, 

look, it is almost winter. In the meantime, I am still 
figuring out the meanings of silence,

what it might take to bargain with 
a future whose nature does not change, 

even if it seems to. I can remember a time
when all I wanted to do was fight it. 

Now I want to be the first one to go,
before other lights are extinguished.

What of the saint 
should be thanked for miracle? The hand
                clasped around the beaded relic, or the grey
tracksuit that sleeved the hand? 
                                                           From the glass-walled 
crypt, his heart was flown like a garnet-colored beetle
and boxed in the church sanctuary. Milk-faced 
and haloed with curls, he could be
                                       any of the children in those late-
night commercials for a cancer research hospital,
before the shaving of heads and placing of ports.
I know that not everyone who dies becomes
                                  a saint just by dying, even if we think  
they're almost holy.  Someone must first be led away
from the brink, brought back to life, rinsed 
of the incurable condition.  
                                    This kind of work seems both 
unremarkable and astonishing. One child survives
the surgery; the other never wakes up
from the ether.

Some think of youth as synonymous with innocence, 
of childhood's landscape as a time uniform and 

unmarked until its transformation. Yet emperors 
and successors of the Dalai Lama were chosen 

even before they reached the age of five. They're sweet 
as children are, giddy in a room full of favorite toys; 

they 'd cry when tired or sleepy. But they reached out, 
touched oracular items as if they recognized them from 

a former life—sandalwood prayer beads, a ritual drum.
Where we are in our ordinary lives, it's the start of another 

hot summer. Blueberry bushes speckle witih fruit that don't 
even make it to ripeness since the birds are early with  

their hunger. Still, there's enough to fill crates arriving 
at the farmer's market; and abundant stone fruit, lacy kale, 

lush peonies. Later, when we walk through the neighborhood, 
our grandson points out anthills, hollows where he thinks rabbits 

burrow; which among the leafy clumps amassed at the base 
of trees are poison ivy. Already, he seems wise beyond his years. 

He listened to his father tell a story about a shoeshine boy 
not much older than him, making his way in a big city 

during the Depression years—that boy kept no more than 
a dollar of every earning, saved the rest for a houseful of

siblings. On one of the hottest days, this boy shaded his mother
with an umbrella as she pulled the trash bins to the curb. 

When I was child, I played
with chesspieces but out of order,

not heeding rules or design.
I skirted around the bishop, laid 

the rounded head of a pawn
in the bowl at the castle's top.

The horses were only horses'
heads, so I could not bridle

them or take them for a canter. 
Slender king, dangerous queen, 

walking the edges of a checkered 
field beyond which forests

breathed, and the patient 
tongues of the sea waited. 

He said, forgive.
Meaning herself. 

How near and soft
that sky is sometimes.

Other times, a heated
iron roof above the sea.