We’ve slipped the clocks back to fool
the darkness, though it is never misled—
The script says, upon getting up we must then
joyfully put our hands together at the sight
of sunlight. Year after year, I’ve tried
to perfect such a skill. But today
when I held out my hand for the woman
painting mehndi, she drew scallops
and lines that circled my wrist
like a net. I turned it this way and that,
mud-colored fish delighting in scales.
Thus everything swirls into a tight
bud of shadow, then fans out as
abundance of arabesques. Beautiful night,
gradually I learn to lean my weight
like the honeysuckle does at the edge
of the trellis, though my throat
wants to open like the flower that blooms
only a few times each year. To desire
like that— to look forward to one brilliance
after fifty weeks of whispering little
swan or sweetest darling.
Or to lie quietly in the cell, listening
for the one that utters her true name.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 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. 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.