Gulity pleasures like lavender soap, good chocolate—
But also shampoo and potato chips in stacked cardboard
towers; squat jars of peanut butter. Whole blocks
of cheddar (no visible sell-by date) that we didn’t realize
until much later, were rations sent by the store owner’s
relatives from overseas. Percale sets divided up and sold
by the piece: pillow slips, flat sheet, fitted sheet. More
division: coffret sets of fragrance, toothpaste packs. Name
brands that rolled off our tongues like candy charms: Brachs,
Hershey’s Kisses; Lucky Strikes, Marlboro Reds; Breck, Hills
Bros., Kraft, Yardley. More rarely: Chanel No. 5, Elizabeth
Arden, English Leather; Johnny Walker, Courvoisier.
Behind bins of local coffee and ubiquitous dry goods, brisk
trade in facing and interfacing with colonial dreams.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) 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.