Preparing the Balikbayan Box

This entry is part 47 of 73 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

It’s almost spring, and I am putting
a large box of things together to send
away across the ocean in a container ship
with many other boxes just like this one.

We call these balikbayan boxes— and we
fill them to the brim (they’re packed and taped,
not weighed, by volume) with every imaginable
first world desire: chocolate, clothes and shoes

bought at various sales throughout the holidays,
books for nieces and nephews; coffee, processed
ham, brined and pressed into teardrop-shaped tins;
liter bottles of shampoo, purse-size samples

of scents and lotions and oils; candy, pain-
killers, cans of tuna and corned beef and Spam.
Strips of masking tape and markers help
to designate which items will go to which

relatives and friends back home. I know
that what I really want to send can’t fit
inside this cardboard box— And so from time
to time I’ll stop to lean against the kitchen door,

survey the goods strewn across the table:
despite the labels, unsure of their destination
as I am uncertain of what real purchase
I have over the things in this world.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Series Navigation← Diorama, with Mountain City and FogThe Jewel in the Fruit →

Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.