Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Out with my daughter: in a blur of window shopping, we see autumn’s gold; persimmons,
muscats, rust browns— soon mirrored outside, for already the season is shifting.

Summer’s warm skins are sloughing off. Whose chill blade comes nearer? Just as one
issue’s resolved, another appears. Reason can hardly keep up with such shifting.

Listen to this work in two parts— opening with a melodic center, followed by fourteen
famous variations. Each section addresses the theme, even while visibly modulating.

Who has fingers of tensile strength, a heart fierce as a beast’s, the touch of sentiment
light as wings? Expressive declensions demand sacrifice: go deeper than technical shifting.

Five overripe figs remain in the cooler— their purply-green skins like tight sweaters
unraveling. Split one along a seam: sweet lesion slicked by the tongue’s shifting.

The heavy film of dust on each window sill accuses me of neglect: the days have been
languid— we’ve worshipped them like heathens. Chill mornings foretell a shifting.

Come love— Wind stirs the leaves and rain starts its preludes. The world tonight is prismed
with water. A raging flood is not like a Venetian canal, with slender boats gently tilting.

In response to small stone (127).

Tell me I’m lucid, says Josephine on the phone. Tell me my mind hasn’t gone. Tell me my speech is clear and that I make sense to you. I picture her on her hospital bed, trying to squeeze a rubber ball with her limp left hand. In sixth grade, during lunch or recess, we used to sit, books in hand, on a grassy knoll at the edge of the school grounds— away from the surveillance of nuns. To our left, a two-storey house with peeling paint, where music and art were taught— And in one room there, a gas oven and large work table where a sister worked with one helper to bake the Sacramental bread, the altar bread, the body of Christ, the host. Sometimes, when they felt generous, they gave us the lattices left behind after they punched circles smaller than cookies on thin sheets of dough; we ate them— unblessed— with our Coke. Just beyond, a row of latrines by the barbed wire fence. We held our breath coming over the path, past the overgrowth twined with morning-glories. There are shooting pains in my fingers, she says; and pins and needles down my side, all along my left foot. I tell her this should be a good sign: There is feeling left; and, Do you remember how we said we wanted to go to Bath? Think of how jolly that will be. Outside, the rain that has fallen all night now glistens on the grass.

In response to Morning Porch and small stone (126).

“cursor is Latin: not one who curses
…but one who runs” ~ D. Bonta

And after the floodwaters receded, a few steps away
from the fountain of the oldest university on the other
side of the world, a giant catfish was found: its rough-

sleek back the color of slate, its bloodied whiskers
stiffening as the sun returned. There was no
sign of the dove coming back with a flag of green,

no olive branches spreading their arms in the middle
of a field. From windows of makeshift shelters,
the stricken looked out upon the city’s mud-

slicked streets. Like odd-shaped pieces of bread,
roofs of houses float upon the waters. The heads
of the gathered are too many to count.

In response to Via Negativa: Cursor.

On the third floor,
rows of boxes lean against
one wall. I no longer know
what’s in them: cables,
books, picture frames?
It doesn’t seem to matter.

*

But today I unwrapped
presents we were given years
ago: one glass kettle with
a blue marble on its lid, a pair
of hand-painted candlesticks;
one hand-crocheted tablecloth
trellised in tiny daisies.

*

We went for a walk
as the sun scalded
the hulls of ships
vermillion, one last
time before giving
in to the dark.

*

Has anyone ever
given you an Indian
rope burn? Voices
of children darting
through jets of water
at the fountain.

*

Quaint towns along
the coast, houses with
wraparound porches.
Perhaps a clearer
view of summer
skies from there.

In response to cold mountain (56): one thing.

Once, I wept long and hard for a prize I wanted so badly but had not won.
It’s painful to learn how skin after skin is shed, in continuous passage.

There was a game we used to play, to come back to ourselves: in the middle of fleeting
thought, someone would call Stop. We’d search within for a foothold, in passage.

The potter urges clay upon the wheel into a shape, then feeds it to the fire. Glaze
and slip applied under noon’s vacant heat: a body emerges out of the kiln, in passage.

From a hospital bed in upstate New York, my friend calls tonight to say she’s been moved
to rehab. After a stroke, her left side is numb; the simplest movement is arduous passage.

I used to take everything for granted, she says. Today it took me fifteen minutes to slide
a button into its hole. The man who made my leg brace lost one arm as a soldier, in passage.

Am I selfish when I confess that sometimes I feel the ones I love most are the ones
that might do me in? My heart tumbles its load like a laundry machine: damp passage.

Crickets sing, metallic in the evenings. In the distance, lightning answers. We turn
the TV on to watch the late night news: chance of hail, thunderstorms in passage.

In response to small stone (118) and small stone (117).