Threaded through, fastened together:
with a needle, a safety pin, stitches
that fused the dried and severed knots
once tethering me to each child
that emerged, solid and distinct,
already resisting. Even then,
the lessons of unmooring— I sank
into an exhausted sleep, thighs slick
and unwashed, not knowing whose
hands whisked them away to be cleaned
and weighed, dropped into a labeled
bassinet. Now they are grown or mostly
grown, their mouths saying no or yes
or later, help me, I want, I don’t
know what to do. Out in the yard
raking, I’ve often paused to consider
the endlessness of labor, how there
is always more before the residues
have been used up or gathered. How my
hands can never be enough to contain
what won’t let itself be contained;
and friends say let it be, let it
just compost back into the soil.
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.