When we entered the room,
I thought someone said “composition.”
My eye lit on a dog-eared legal pad
in the roll-top desk, and a Parker
fountain pen still in its velvet-backed case.
They all came from a time lit
by a different glow: not the blue light
from a monitor screen, but the warm
yellow lozenge cast by a Banker’s lamp.
We changed the bulb and pulled on the chain
several times to our satisfaction.
In one of the drawers I found
a lace doily with a coffee stain,
several small padlocks with rusted keys.
In none of the papers bundled with rubber
bands or twine could we find anything
resembling a will. There was one
savings passbook; there were no blank
or canceled checks. You can read
in the rubber-stamped ledgers tiny
numbers in purple ink showing
how nothing was overdrawn.
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.