We’d walk down the hill and pass
the orchid-sellers, the hawkers
of small, brightly colored birds
caught in traps deep in the mountains.
At the corner of Chanum, the dentist’s
shiny polished Chevy Del Ray parked
in his driveway. In the market,
the slime of fish guts underfoot
and the vivid green of seaweed
in sellers’ baskets. Pressing
deeper in, past the stalls displaying
tiers of sausages and the dry goods
section, eventually we’d come upon
the currency changers. We bought
bars of Hershey’s chocolate there,
or small expensive cans of Spam
and potato chips. Coming back
we took our time, circling the man-
made lake and the rowboats lazy
on its surface— this world
small as the hollow of a teacup,
the rare sound of a chopper overhead.
In every yard at dusk, the brittle
tines of brooms sweeping over stones.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and 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.