He turns to the woman
analyst in the room and asks
repeatedly where she is really
from. Where her people are from.
Which you know, if you’re a person
of color, is code for things like Aren’t
those slits you have for eyes evidence of
your sly and shifty nature? She tries
to understand how something like this
can be happening. It’s the late 21st
century yet here’s the same old shit: You
couldn’t possibly be qualified, given your
ethnicity. On the matter of credentials,
and does she have them: all she can
think of is a string of sarcastic
interrogatives— Can a duck swim?
Is water wet? Do idiots become
geniuses overnight? Does Howdy
Doody have hollow wooden balls?
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.