Dress comfortably, but not in last night’s negligee.
Nothing by mouth after midnight: personally,
I don’t really like the taste of nothing. I am reminded
of sawdust, or of certain fiber residues a.k.a. lint
from the dryer. Everything, therefore, should be
permissible. The treadmill will incline in the correct
direction if you can successfully use the word
cardiovascular as a slant rhyme. If you cannot use
your legs, you will be allowed to crank a bicycle with
your arms. If you make the electrodes click to the rhythm
of Tico-Tico, the test results may become unreadable,
or perhaps more readable. This is very serious, I am not joking.
It is important to know the measure of certain things in regard
to the heart: whether the blood, loosed like a caged animal
no longer used to the wild, will be able to return through
corridors narrowed by an abundance of grief and care,
or made dense with neglect; whether it will consent
to lie down in chambers that have grown too small,
their walls opening to looped circuits without end.
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.
I love this. Especially the images of those last six lines. Terrific.
Thank you, Joan.
Beautiful! Yes, the closure of the poem, specially “corridors narrowed by an abundance of grief and care,” just takes my breath away.