RICE
By Luisa Igloria

In the beginning we rocked in a vessel of water,
an envelope of skin. Membrane
waiting to be written on, tissue wound

from the breath of others, we swam up these
passages bathed with a strange light
formed of language and chants, laughter

and crying. Words showed the way,
waiting to swaddle us in the only true
clothing. Here, open your mouth, your fist—

In the beginning this is how the first
grain of rice came to our people,
out of a drought, out of a season

heavy only with lightning and dust
storms. Everyone was hungry, crawling
into the corners of their huts

to lie in piles of mud and excrement.
They forgot their names, their desires,
the pathways to rivers that had anyway shriveled

into dreams without current, without fish.
Threads hung in ragged curtains from the loom.
Combs of tortoise shell fell soundless to the floor

and boxes of betel nut and leaf surrendered
to the sunlight, withering into green dust.
Despair laid its bones in a circle and begged

for wind, for breath, for the sound of stone
striking stone, anything to twist like fire through the gut,
like a singing knife severing hair from the gaunt

literature of the body. The earth mother
spreads a blanket of fog, fragile as grace. She sheds
tears of love and pity causing the rivers to film over

with water and leaping sound. For food
she bends over the now dark soil and squeezes
her breasts, watching the white milk churn

in the furrows and change into spears
of grain. She squeezes so hard that blood flows
from her breasts, the color of red mountain rice.

And when we eat the fragrant food, we mingle
in our mouths like this the taste of rain
and birth, the salt of blood-remembering.

© Luisa Igloria

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