The yard guys who it seemed
went into hibernation all winter
show up promptly on the first
day of spring with their noisy
leaf blowers, their headphones,
their hedge trimmers. They nuke
the weeds in the backyard, cart
away all the dead limbs and
a season’s worth of brittle
gumballs on the ground. As if
influenced by all this activity,
our youngest daughter attacks
all the drawers and closets
in her room, piling outgrown
knick-knacks and clothing
in brown grocery bags: itchy
plaid shirts that no longer
button easily across the chest,
graphic tees and sweatshirts
she describes as being from
those “emo 7th grade days.”
And I, inspired now too
by the desire to make things
clean and airy, drag the grey
area rug to the deck and hose
it down with soap and water.
While I pick bits of hair
(all our shedding) off the pile,
I notice the falling-down shed
and its worn wood surface,
the dull greenish hue creeping
across the fence… Touch one thing
and it leads to another: soon the seeds
flower and the bud swirls to leaf;
blackbirds come to raid
the reddening fruit, and you
stand blinking in the sunshine,
trying to recall everything you told
yourself you were going to do next.
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.