Written by Luisa A. Igloria on Nov 19, 2022 12:00 am
* Who are you and whom do you love?
When I find out the truth about my birth,
I already have two children of my own.
* What do you remember about the earth?
I am six and the terrible grandmother has come to live
with us. She smells of tobacco and the green eucalyptus-
mint Valda pastilles she is always popping into her mouth
from a tin hidden in her robe pocket. A game I like to play
with some of the neighborhood kids involves taking turns
putting Necco wafers in each other's mouths while intoning
"The body of Christ." We are careful not to bite down
so as not to cause the body of Christ to bleed. Then
we walk around the grassy perimeter of the truck yard
pretending we are floating, until the candy has melted
and our tongues turn lime green, orange, or pink.
* How will you begin?
A book about mountains, and roads carved into them by hand.
A book made of animal offerings suspended in the trees.
A book about salt blocks left in the valley for deer.
* Describe a morning you woke without fear.
I am in third grade. I am standing in the bathroom in front
of the mirror, swiveling the tiny little bit of bone that's been
lodged for as long as I can remember in my upper gum,
right above a front tooth, back and forth. When it finally
comes loose, I hold it between my index finger and thumb.
* Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
When I first come across the word "debridement," I pronounce
the middle vowel as a long ī. As in bride. Because one of my daughters
is taking a Women's Studies course on sex and marriage, I try to recall
what I learned at her age about such things. It was a time when feminine
products were unwieldy things: a bulk of cotton wrapped with gauze,
safety-pinned to the crotch of underwear. Mostly, my mother told me
to behave while handing me a copy of On Becoming A Woman, a book
written and published in 1951 by a male doctor. The cover depicted
a brunette with what might have been described as a becoming
flush on her cheeks, walking past two young men in suits.
The one sitting on a bench has two-tone saddle shoes on his feet.
The other, standing, sports a bow tie. Both of them are obviously
looking her up and down. Checking her out. She is definitely aware.
[Note: as a lead-in to the 12-year anniversary Sunday,
20 November 2022, of my writing at least a poem a day,
I decided to use Bhanu Kapil's famous "12 Questions"
as a prompt. There are the first six. My students in Advanced
Poetry Workshop and I have been using it too, also because
one of our course texts this semesteer was Chen Chen's
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency—
he also uses "12 Questions" for a number of poems in his new book.]
Written by Dave Bonta on Nov 18, 2022 10:17 pm
burning some old barn
beams for fuel
the 19th-century knots
pop like pistols
and my train of thought
goes off the rails
forlornly blowing
its figurative whistle
into a night bright
with fallen snow
we’re all fugitives
from the present moment
in our distracted states
of america
no wonder it takes gunshots
to wake us up
i hear footsteps
in the kitchen
and find myself
in the bathroom mirror
happy to dwell
in this icy stillness
it’s the future
i’d like to escape
a choose-your-own-
doom story
we picture as a shining city
on a hill which once
might have been more
like a mountain
Written by Luisa A. Igloria on Nov 18, 2022 02:14 pm
You're wrong: evolution isn't something that stopped
happening sometime in the past—If it helps, think
more of those moving walkways you see at airport
terminals, with people standing on the right who seem
perfectly content to let themselves be borne
along at a steady rate, while others who want
to move faster than the conveyor belt stride through
on the left so the plane doesn't leave without
them. Then there are those who eye change
with suspicion; or worse, insist on a story
they might have pickled or slapped together
along the way: for instance, the statewide mandate
to teach schoolchildren that Native Americans
were "the first immigrants" to this nation.
That one is plainly a lie even Magellan or Columbus
would see right through—after all, didn't they
want to be the first? Maybe a better subject for study
is the evolution of crabs, which excites scientists
no end because apparently, they have evolved
at least five times over the last 250 million years,
sometimes losing crabby features, sometimes gaining
newly interesting ones. Why some are small as a pea
and others wear the face of doomed Samurai
warriors on their backs is still a mystery.
Some are true or carcinized crabs, which
makes it sound like they might have served
jail time. There are forward-moving crabs and
crabs that only walk sideways; crabs that swim
and others that live in the mud. Crabs with giant
claws become shell-crushing predators
in an ecological arms race. You can tell the false
crabs by counting how many pairs of walking legs
they have: three instead of four, with a miniature,
sorely undeveloped-looking pair in the rear.
