The first time I take
my then youngest child
with me on a trip is also
the first time I’m not
traveling abroad alone.
It’s hard to manage two
carry-on wheelies &
a kindergartener who’s never
been on an escalator. Step.
Yes, step. Quickly before
the next one swallows
the one before it. This is
before the days of complicated
TSA checks & we’re still
on local soil so an airport
orderly helps. I buy a bag
of peanut butter cookies
& a bottle of water.
We wait to board the plane.
My child is restless and skips
from one window to another,
humming under her breath.
There are foreigners of course:
in Hawaiian shirts, smelling
like suntan lotion, probably
back from Boracay or Cebu. One
of them, a white man, stoops
to talk to her, then folds
a ten dollar bill into a square
then tucks it swiftly into
the pocket of her sweater. He’s
nondescript: khakis, knit polo,
a little grey around the temples.
She’s six; pert, unafraid, makes
eye contact. He turns to me
without preamble, says he’s back
from the province where he’s gone
to meet the family of his lady
friend. He looked up a bureau,
got access to their catalogs
& this way found a nice girl
he’ll marry & take back
to a little town just outside
of Michigan. He says: by the way,
I gave her a little something
to keep safe for me until
next time. I gather up my child,
our things, as thankfully
the doors open for boarding.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. 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.