In the overcrowded cafe, just as I
get up from the table to gather my books
and computer and put on my jacket, a couple
comes up to me and breathlessly the woman asks
Are you leaving? When I tell them I am, she
exclaims Oh good! then rapidly collects herself.
The man with her laughs and she offers
I didn’t mean that, slightly mortified. Oh yes
you did, I laugh back. And I’ve been there
before, scanning the room for the empty seat,
angling my body toward the clearest opening
or shortest path leading to the exit or check-
out line. Whatever name you call it: selfishness,
the will to survive, an instinct for self-
preservation— you’ve got to admire the way
the gut kicks in and takes over. The way
something so sure about the situation
steps up, finds the words before you
can even think them; lays a claim,
moves in to make its presence known.

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.
Yes! And it’s less interesting and more elemental in the parking lots around Christmas.