Author: Luisa A. Igloria

One summer we hiked to my grandfather’s farm. Ninety degrees in the shade, sandaled
feet stumbling in carabao dung. I did my best to look as if I knew how to live.

Five days a week I used to teach in the capital, six hours from home. Riding the midnight
bus, I saw families huddled in sleep by the underpass; how was this a way to live?

Every now and then I’ll remember something with a start, like fruit I had in childhood.
Bell-shaped macopa: red skin, cool, spongy hearts. Their taste, hard to re-live.

A cross between indigo and purple— this is the star apple’s signature. A five-
fingered flower, pulp thick and sweet, encasing the seed that might live.

The waiter brings my usual bowl of noodles in clear broth, a pair of battered shrimp.
For the umpteenth time I tell him: soup spoon, not ladle— the mouth’s hinges would give!

I love the way light moves across surfaces: the floor beneath the bay becoming
honey, water rippling itself and what holds it in. A window’s essential, to live.

In a darkened room I stretch out and practice: slow down my breathing, arrange arms
straight by my sides. Imagine how cells quit movement, the compulsion to live.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“…Mothers weep in the corners of those paintings
while a man, each morning, sweeps the church floor.”
~ Connie Voisine, “The Altar” by George Herbert

Every day, dirt prints on the kitchen floor,
and under the furniture, thick new pelts
of dust. Perhaps this detritus that gathers

is the sediment of dried-up tears? Taking out
the trash and pushing the bin against the far end
of the driveway, I see petite roses in bloom.

Blood-red, pressed between the fence and the water
meter. Pitimini, once I heard a woman call them:
she made floral arrangements for the church, came in

the side door of the rectory, careful to take off
her shoes and coat in the vestibule. Unrolling sheets
of newsprint on tile, she laid out ferns, divided

showy chrysanthemums from tall gladioli; and, finishing,
tucked the slighter blooms in between the hardier stems—
baby’s breath, those miniature roses. Her hands did not seem

to mind delving into their cache of sharp hooks,
guiding scratchy stems into clear vases filled with water.
I cannot remember whether she was Isabel, or Delia, or Florinda.

She came to freshen the flowers every other day, before the sun
was up. I don’t know why the ghost of her name meets me here
at the end of the driveway, pointing out the flowers.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Unto every one that hath shall be given, says the sky:
and so the flowerbeds spread their skirts lined with mulch,
and the odor rose into the air, mold of wood mingled
with the fragrance of budding things. And the frost
that earlier rimmed the outlines of each blade
of grass: overtaken by rain, so many needles
running stitches into the earth.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Of brass and iron, of bronze or bell metal, a house
within which the clapper might sound— What slips

into the wind, sometimes slight as a prayer?
A warbler’s call before it fades,

the curl of incense bearing the names
of all we’ve lost, all we seek—

Hour upon hour is struck: diligent notes that echo
to the yoke and crown, to the waist and lip—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

My hair has thinned, but it’s grown longer. I run a sheen of oil across the ends after a bath. That warm haze outside is pollen: floating archipelagos of amber, speckled marcasite, frosted orange. From the closet, I pick a blouse of cotton voile so it might breathe, another skin against my skin. A crow flaps up from the blackcurrant bushes: my first letter of the day! Later, the wind lifts the light higher. A green blush deepens on the hillside. Names of the dead sough through the branches, like needles of pine raining through the air.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

There’s the sky’s bright wound again, open, gaping.
What time is it? Too long, too heavy, too much.

One can’t properly cook with a toaster oven. Tea with crackers isn’t much
for sustenance. But there are those with the gall to say that’s too much.

Would you really begrudge an elder a share of bread and board?
Would you yell at her: Turn off the lights, the bill’s too much?

There’s the sky’s bright wound again, open, gaping. And its eyes
are bottomless wells, staring. Too naked, too raw, too much.

How much evidence is needed? Here’s fortitude, and making do,
and doing without. At the end of the day, the ache of too much.

I’ve been flame for you, tinder, clay pot. I’ve been the fuse and the hunger,
the ticket and the ticket box. At the end of the day, all too much.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cooler and more overcast today; but in the parking lot at work,
a Blue Bunny ice cream truck circles, playing “La Cucaracha“—

Which makes me think of my friend Pinky, whose favorite way of saying
someone’s acting nutty is: Ay! she has a case of the cucarachas.

We know of course about cockroaches: in other places they go by
palmetto bug, croton bug, waterbug— all the same, a cucaracha.

An ant might walk with exquisite slowness; but have you ever
had to duck in fear of an armor-plated, dive-bomber cucaracha?

Fun facts: a cockroach can go without water for two weeks, without food
for a month. Squished, their slime might resemble green tea matcha.

And how about this: some female cockroaches only mate once and stay
pregnant for life! That would definitely make me crazy, you betcha.

When I read this: Immature American cockroaches look like wingless adults—
for a while it seemed we were no longer just referring to las cucarachas.

In my childhood home we kept potatoes and other dark-loving tubers beside
the rice bin under the sink, until a dark brown army swarmed over the kabocha.

It may have been the year I learned the Mexican Hat Dance for Field Day at school,
felt silly twirling a skirt with cellophane ruffles to the refrain of “La Cucaracha.”

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.