Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The world is an over-plundered beehive.
But the queens are starting community 
pantries and clinics. Their hair: electric 
with ruin. Their armor: cobbled of plastic 
straws— but they have smooth stingers. 
They don’t die after stinging. Every morning, 
light flakes from the salt cellar that is the sky. 
In Rome, where the Pope is dying, the swallows 
are weaving a shroud. Midmorning scatters 
a darkness of rubies. By noon, darkness 
might lift, if you say it could lift or 
if stones could unroll like curtains. 
Night is made of the bodies of thousands 
of bees. You hear them, even if you don't 
see them. You can be sure, whoever preens 
for the camera is the head of the evil empire. 
Those made complicit bow their heads: timid 
serfs, servus, scrapers. Who can still recite 
history’s indubitable facts about freedom? 
Flags of countries make T-shirts only 
tourists will buy. I would destroy 
spaceships if I could. Tomorrow, the light 
will be obsidian and have the flavor of smoke. 
You think all seers and prophets are either 
blind or extinct. But you can hear the sure 
tapping of their canes in labyrinthine 
hallways. They're closer than you think. Nothing 
is truly random. The universe doesn't make 
mistakes that can't be corrected. 

Adrift, at sea; in water higher than my chin, I'd
      break down because I never learned to swim.
Call me a wimp, but I get itchy looking at caterpillars; 
      don't think it's OK to be tattooed in hives.
Every time I think about dying, I pray: immediate and
      fast, please— not drawn out over months, years even. 
Get me the equivalent of a Concorde, London to New York; or
      half the time for sound to travel through a medium. 
Incomprehensible, but some have been impaled by falling icicles.  
      Jealousy's pinch, preceding fatal complication.
Lightning victim, hair on fire beside a gutted tree.   
      Midway through a trip, falling off a cliff from 
nonsense ideas for selfies. (Stand in front of a train?
      Or have a freak accident, slipping and falling on
pans of upturned knives in an open dishwasher?) 
      Quietly napping on the couch, then have a meteorite  
slam through the roof and hit you. All manner of
      turbulence breaking open in our lives,
undoing our sense of safety. I'd rather not be choked by
      vines or swallowed whole by a reticulated python,
walloped then skewered by a swordfish. I'd rather not be
      xenophobically targeted, nor sucked into the   
yaw of a meat grinder. I'd rather not choke on a mouthful of 
      zabaglione, its custardy froth laced with Marsala.

The first time I saw it was on the stained 
ivory face of my father's Seamaster De Ville— 

like half a miniature burnished circle 
pressing down into a sumo squat— before 

I learned Omega was the last letter of 
the Greek alphabet; the symbol for the end.

It was a hand-me-down, a gift from a wealthy 
cousin who smoked cigars, drove sports cars 

and sent his children to schools in Europe 
or America. In Revelation, God calls himself 

the Alpha and the Omega. This means, he 
who is and was and who is yet to come; 

in other words, infinity or the eternal.  
My father cherished the watch, perhaps  

among the most expensive personal items he'd ever 
come to own. When it stopped or ran fast or slow, 

he took it to the Indian shopkeeper on Session
Road, who knew about such things. I'm not sure,

but it must have been buried with him when 
he died. My father was not infinite or eternal. 

Clear as a timepiece wrapped around my wrist, only 
his memory ticks in my mind with no beginning or end.   

Everyone has something to say. 
While this is true, not everything said
makes it into the news or the archive. 

All night, the noisy congress of frogs; 
the screeching of possums and owls. Who 
conducts their decorum, who launches 

a 24-hour filibuster? Where does it come from, 
the audacity to address history, to say wait 
a minute, listen to me? I'll say I'm tired 

of endlessly rolling the wheels of commerce,
one of millions of hamsters unfairly predicted
to die before tasting their reward. I'm afraid 

to look too closely at pickup trucks on the road 
flying flags with a giant blue X on a field of red. 
Part of you occasionally doesn't know how to feel 

about never having learned to handle a gun. But you
still believe in the kind of hope that wants to be 
done with war. Our parents wore their shoes until

their soles came undone. They studied books, and also 
believed certain things are more durable than weapons 
or words: what we mean when we say I give you my word. 
  

In Artemisia's painting, completed 
          in 1612 when she was only 20, 
Judith beheads the invader-general, 
          assisted by her maid. Sometimes 
I forget that the artist is not the woman
          she portrays in this scene, face
resolute above the blade that's already severed
          the arteries in his neck. Raped at 17, 
she wouldn't recant her accusations at the trial
          of her rapist, though they tortured her 
with thumbscrews. From whichever angle, the subject
          is who gets to tell the truth, or who 
would be believed. The artist has given it to us—
          her truth. It stains everything in 
proximity: the tufted sheets, the hands that took
          on this work; blood-spatter on her breast.  

"...for him it was not an important failure"
               "Musée des Beaux Arts," W.H. Auden 


They may have never been wrong 
about the indifference of people 
and animals, the banality 
of evil and suffering— but what 
if at all did they know about 
its opposite, joy; of how
it must have felt to leave 
the labyrinth, spread your wings 
and glide through a sky honeyed 
with sunlight? Easy enough to mark 
this only as the site of disaster: 
aircraft falling out of the sky, bodies
tumbling into the river spangled 
with ice. Easy enough to say
nothing to see here now, move  
along— except the water glitters
with the shapes of the newly dead,
and nothing can sail calmly on.     
   
 
*Sea of Icarus
 

All day, her memories rake hard 
ground in search of lost gems, 

in search of veins that might 
lead to a heart of ore. Or 

they cluster like raucous birds 
in the morning and sing off-key, 

like children learning a melody 
by rote. She opens the shoe closet,

hunting for a pair to cover her feet
against the cut of stones. There's no map

to tell her how far she should go, how 
deep to dig. How far under layers of rock

and shale does the water table dwell?
Beneath is the aquifer, groundwater.

 
You know you're only mortal and not a god

           but that doesn't mean you know nothing 

about how language is right now being used 

           to camouflage ignorance as virtue, villainy

as self-control, avarice as acumen. Whole 

           planes collide mid-air or roll over in flames 

on the tarmac. Lawyers stutter I don't know 

           rather than tell the truth. Sure they know. 

Of course we know things. And we know it takes 

           balls to admit the truth of what you said

you didn't see coming, until the shadow of 

           a beach umbrella transforms lickety split,

darkly flaring over your head. Drop your chili

           lime margarita and sunblock— it's cobra hoods 

all the way down. (That's actually the name 

           of a line of garments designed for tactical 

concealment, though I meant the actual viper 

           drawing its head back before the strike.) 

In old tales, not all serpents are sinister. 

           Think of doctor-healer Aesculepius and his 

snake-encircled caduceus: Zeus killed him 

           with thunderbolts, afraid of how his science

brought humans back from the brink of death. 

           If you don't want to be a myth, be a mystery 

—but the kind that doesn't stifle the wonder 

           out of stars and stones and fir-clad 

forests. Don't be a thug or a bully or a dick. 

You know those emails 
that begin with Hey— 
Hey what did I miss
when I wasn't in class 
      the other day?

I learned hey (or hei, 
or hai) in the middle ages was 
a shout of encouragement
to hunting
      dogs.

That made me wonder: 
was I ever sharp as
a hunting dog, 
back in my 
      own heyday?

When people say
heydey they usually mean
back in the time you were
in the state of 
     greatest vigor 

or when you were younger
and at your freshest,
smartest, most 
scintillating best.
     As if youth—

that knockout, 
six-pack, smasher—  
were all you needed
to walk into a room
     and claim it.

I didn't even think I had
a brain back then. But hey, 
I've earned some mileage, 
and love that now I can say  
    yeah, I know some shit. 

"There comes a time when silence is betrayal." 
                       - Martin Luther King, Jr.


Not to belittle your pain, my pain,
but none of this is even original 
anymore: the world (suddenly, again) 
a window-box sprouting every 
variety of that noxious flower  

called despot. Astounding how so many 
come from humble beginnings (clerk, 
schoolteacher, cobbler, cook), then 
turn. What was it: abuse in childhood,
beatings from alcoholic fathers, 

abandonment by their mothers? They wore 
a sense of wounded humanity as if it were  
a scar inflicted on no one else but them, ever. 
After seizing power, some became so paranoid 
they hired lookalikes, or had body doubles 

surgically altered. Not a morsel passed 
their lips until food tasters swallowed first, 
without falling down dead. As history does, it runs 
its course, including punishing years of massacre, 
purge, brutal torture. When history catches up 

to them, it's astounding, too, how terrible 
yet ordinary they look in those final closeups. 
Rotting teeth, ashen thumbprint of hair above 
the lips, bloodshot eyes; their bodies hung 
upside down, or pressed into a wall by bullets.