You have no shovel, so you forage in the cupboards
to find only a plastic fork and two knives. So
is this what it feels like in those fairy tales
where the girl is sentenced to labor after impossible
labor, before being granted access and social mobility?
What the villain/ess doesn’t understand: the girl
was born in a third world country, where she learned
to shampoo and bathe with a scant pailful of water,
where snacks are a euphemism for all the inventive
ways one might use every part of the animal for food.
Stables, lions, sky-darkening hordes of birds? You
got nothin’ on me, Hercules; and isn’t a deus ex machina
just another name for cheating? Your parents
have to work in the fields. Or they are sick,
missing, dead. Try dandling your new baby brother
on one hip while feeding your two-year old sister
when you’re only five. Try taking them out
into the avenue to weave through traffic, splay
begging fingers against the tinted window glass
of cars. Shred after shred layers the years;
petulance and bad temper are so unnecessary.
They will not make the miracle you pray for—
only stubborn patience, the improv work of your hands
as you make a hollow in the gravelly soil deep enough
for this plant you have brought to take root and grow.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) 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 was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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.