1 On All-You-Can-Eat
A sentence is not always a consequence waiting to happen.
The edges of the park were yellow-taped from the public.
When the first man landed on the moon, I only wanted to go
home. No one listens to the radio after the hurricane makes
landfall. I dreamt of walls papered with ripped bougainvillea.
People always say the safest place is the center of the house.
I finished school a hundred years before you laid the first stone of your
academy. With patience, anyone can gather enough melted wax to shape
into a ball. The hours are longest when you can’t understand the love-
cries of crickets. Fingers learn the way in the dark. With only one pail
of water, you learn to wet your hair sparingly and soap down just once.
I know how to use up a thing to make it stronger when it’s gone.
You didn’t take away my job, you only took away one of my
disguises. What you don’t see you will never see.
2 On Emptiness and the Void
What you don’t see you will never see.
But oh what you could know, if you saw.
I knew no one who wanted to be the last to know.
This is about secrets plain as water lying in the sun.
This is about a lifetime of practice coming in on the heels of the favorite horse.
This is about the hope that perpetual labor delivers the soul into its heaven.
Twice now, I’ve come upon a colony of mushrooms under the citrus tree.
Once, in a store, everything we saw was made of staves from old wine barrels.
If you try to see into the future, all you find is a mirror clouded with distortions.
A praying mantis looks like a branch denuded of its green.
How could you know you’d become a candleholder, chair leg, rocker?
Split a fish open down the middle; its eye still holds on to its envelope.
Every butchered animal glistens with onyxes of blood and bile.
After a body is turned inside out, what of it is finally exhausted?
3 On Inevitable Collapse
What of a body is finally exhausted after it’s turned inside out?
I thought the hospital where I wanted to get a mammogram had closed.
A sign appeared on the sidewalk with the words luxury and development.
I can’t count the times I’ve had to swallow what’s called humble pie.
Some people are always giving advice like Play to win.
The only questions worth asking have words no one says much anymore.
It took a while to find the name of the person who spoke so rudely to us.
Some people have an unshakeable belief in their ability to prevail.
You have no idea how much I steel myself but hope for joy.
He said, You must admit you’ve been brave.
I just like to make sure everything is zipped up tight.
What of a body needs rewinding, refreshing?
Sleek with cinnabar sheen, a fox has been seen in the neighborhood.
Wouldn’t you rather be subaltern to the possible though seemingly improbable?
4 On Repetition
I would like to be subaltern to the possible,
though I don’t mean subaltern in the way
natives, in colonies overtaken by empires,
were stripped of property and their own
agency, including their indigenous tongue.
What I mean to say is I wouldn’t mind yoking
my view of the world to something that instructs me
to let go of all I’ve been taught about knowing
my place, or the belief any pleasure or reward could
rightfully be mine to claim in the present.
Historical trauma means walking around in the world
with ghosts draped on your back as if this were
ordained, as if you were nothing but their beast of burden—
until the day you realize not all wounds are yours to bear.
. . .
For more of this poem or other poetry in Issue 21.1, order now in our online store. Digital copies are only $5.
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize for poetry, for Caulbearer (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), and the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020) and thirteen other books. She teaches in the MFA creative-writing program at Old Dominion University.
