I am sitting on the deck in the heat
that hasn’t dissolved yet though it is evening,
because I want to be in the open, away
from the smells of oil & frying in the kitchen
though this makes me fair game for Asian tiger
mosquitoes circling my ankles & arms
& the sides of my neck. I feel the grief
that comes not only from histories I could recite
even in my sleep, but also from the wreckage
of the future, whose foghorn sounds closer
& closer each night. I am reading a poem
by Alice Notley, which she ends by saying
I have nothing to show for my time but poems/
what do you have… The pot of mint that survived
this brutal weather sends up its faint
sweet-pungent trail of breath & I don’t know
if it’s this which undoes me or if it’s those words.
& I don’t care anymore if this is cliché but my heart
is breaking & I wish the curtain of cicada trills
were thick enough for me to drown in. How sure
they seem of their purpose & how to accomplish it—
Wait years & years, spend it all on one thing,
then quit this earth— If I had their certainty
would I give up all I had too without
questioning? Now it gets close to the end
but my inventory is small; & it isn’t the kind
that could provide what others desperately
need or want. I am only one piece in a story
I don’t know the end or beginning of; I’m in a state
of perpetual second-guessing & if there’s anyone
who might know the answers, they’re long gone
from this world or maybe they were never here,
yet they’re always the first to pass judgment.
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.