it’s customary among many humans
to speak of wishes and write them down
on brightly colored strips of paper
which they’ll burn at the stroke of midnight.
Or, according to my daughter calling
from a tiny town in Portugal, they’ll put
twelve raisins on their tongue, one
for each month of the year. I forgot
to ask if you’re supposed to eat them
one by one; does chewing then
swallowing them together nix out
or amplify the extended release
features of all that good fortune
desired for the immediate future?
We believe mostly in the efficacy of will,
that there are still some things in the world
open to choice. Do you want the steak
dinner or the mushroom casserole,
the red or white wine to go with that?
Did you want to bring a child with you
over the border just to have her die
of hunger and neglect in the over-
crowded detention camp? Perhaps
this offends your sensibilities. Perhaps
it isn’t fair to consider the mundane
varieties of hunger equal to those
born in greater exigency. At the same
time, there are some things which exist
only as apparent example of their
lethality: take the manchineel tree, lush
and green and spreading, but toxic in all
its parts. Don’t touch the bark, don’t eat
the fruit though it looks like an adorable
miniature apple; don’t even breathe
the air immediately under it. This is
the very same fruit whose sap
Calusa warriors smeared on the tips
of arrows that killed conquistador
Juan Ponce de Leon in his attempt
to colonize Florida in 1521. He
probably didn’t know what gored him
in the thigh other than a sharp piece
of metal at the end of a shaft:
someone else’s will not to be so easily
made vassal, subaltern, subject.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and 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.