Luisa A. Igloria

Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the author of The Saints of Streets(University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and 8 other books.

When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, hand-binds books, listens to tango music, and keeps her radar tuned for cool lizard sightings.

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This is me. This is me trying
to make sense of twigs and dried matter
on the path, beer cans and cinders left over
from someone else’s bonfire—

This is me trying to make sense
of swings in weather,
of the sun’s nearly always meltingly
cheap, successful seductions

so layers come off and all
we want to do is lie
in the yard or on the beach,
shirts off, trousers off, hearts open—

This is me,
mother of many trials
stumped and stumped again
by the fact you whip out yet another one

between the real-world-job
and the third-, fourth-, invisible
shift job that says open more, open,
open, Mamacita, you’ve got

so much to give. Not to be
ungrateful or quotidian, not to be unkind
or unmoving, but for once I would like the water in the ditch
to taste more like water and not like dried grass in the mouth—

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 11 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Emergence.

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On the label of a small
plastic mold of almond jelly,
a warning: Please be careful and chew
separately before swallowing.
You stop for a second, then realize
what it might be trying to say is
Potential choking hazard! Or, don’t
let your child try to consume
this treat in just one swallow.
You know this is true: how often
has a mouthful of smooth come back
up the hatch, tasting like bile;
or had you doubled up in the night,
wondering What the hell was I thinking?

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 09 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Out.

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Why not return
in proper coin
what you have taken
of my wool or spice,
for copper sluiced
through mountains’ veins?
Ah, I know that fear:
it’s you you glimpse
beneath my alien skin,
familiar form that darkens
your dreams but stoops,
ordered, to clear the cane
and harvest crops for your white-
linened table. With each
pass of the machete, a stalk
surrendered to your storehouse.
At end of day I wash my face
and dust-streaked arms at the pump,
careful to conceal the meagre
earnings you might confiscate
on small pretext— as if
the indentured have no right to call
back their own names at night.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 08 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Proverbial.

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The woman at the meeting wants to know
about representation: where her ideas went,
why her name isn’t listed
as a volunteer.
The room grows quiet as her voice
deepens in timbre, rises
in pitch and complaint— The body
of documents we assemble
through the hours
fills binders lined up on the shelves.
Outside, in their inside,
insects build their own structures:
walls woven of their tongues’
and bodies’ excretions,
tunnels lined with bits of hair.
Every now and then we find
a cell abandoned, its hinges
torn asunder in the wind.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 08 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Evergreens.

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When the phone rings, sometimes I get palpitations.
Worry causes palpitations.
Mothers seem to have an inexhaustible supply of worry.
Worry can be aggravated by having a new cellphone model with apps
that allow you to imagine you can know more than you actually can
about situations over which you really have no control.
In the meantime, small birds fly up into bare branches.
The outline of orange glimpsed through the crosshatched branches
is not fire but the sun setting over the Elizabeth river.
Winter is bone white in patches, slush and grey in others.
The plumber said it was lucky the flow that bubbled from toilet flange
into the hallway from the sewer backup was no more than an inch.
The surface got wet, but the heartwood was spared.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 05 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Grand jete.

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How is it winter still, how can we
be called to keep burying the desolate

in its customary abode? Not underground
but in the air, where no limits hold—

beyond weightlessness, demise of blooms
pressed into premature fluorescence.

Pity the skirl on the crest
of a bagpipe; pity the ice cap,

one pure sweep of cloud— I’d ask
for a bed woven by kind-hearted doves.

I’d ask for one bright fruit plucked
out of heaven: that is to say,

any mouthful of earth
that I’d been widowed from.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 04 2014
In response to Via Negativa: Winter Gardener.

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This entry is part 23 of 23 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14

Mother, how will you drink out of the cold stream now that you’ve made a gift of your front teeth to the dentist in town? You hold out the little finger of your left hand in a dream, and it is wired with fine, thin silver. I would not know except that you told me, whispering in the way you used to spin stories out of the air, each one linked by And then. I wish you could see how it is snowing again outside my window, and I am wearing socks that you did not make with your hands. The drifts are soft as carded wool, or nubby like new growth on the backs of calves. Where they fall on the neighbor’s unpruned bushes, I want to string my prayer flags: indigo for memory, ivory for the touch of your hand, red for the blaze in our hearts, turquoise for the years lost to count; and last: burn of saffron, gold of sacrifice.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 03 2014
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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A rain of ink fell on a clear day and I was refreshed by its lightly lightly double syllables; and it made me think, dearest dearest one of how we are all fussy birds with too many feathers; but a little water will not do any harm. Aren’t we all imprisoned in bad translations, wanting to escape— brides shedding our tulle and crinoline to run off with a rogue? My most cherished and crucial here and now, you are present as time and as gift, even in the boundaries where most of us dwell, every kind of hybrid, little cutting grafted from another vine. Seasonal as migrant labor, temporal as weather. Wild birds, untethered on yellow bicycles or riding in cabs driven through unfamiliar cities by immigrants born in another clime. In the rear-view mirror, my Ethiopian driver Beni-yamin cocks one eyebrow at my backpack and says, Lady, but where is your luggage for putting in the trunk? And I laugh and say There is only this. He tells me of his mother who went away to work for a family in the city when she was only ten. From the glass his eyes look back at mine. Beni-yamin, Benjamin, he is only twenty-four. And he is telling me I have to go back someday and buy a house to which I can return when the rain does not fall so softly softly anymore. What if that kind of rain is everywhere? It will not be enough to find the clay that matches. May you have a good life, he says. The words, the words might be one place to start.