At the holiday party, two people
arguing about whether you start to count
the 12 days of Christmas on Christmas day itself,
or the day after. I’d woken up that morning
in a panic, after a dream that a whole
handful of hair on the left side of my head
came out in my hand. It looked like I’d just
had an asymmetrical undercut, which
was actually popular way back in Edwardian
times. In the dream I debated combing
the hair on the right side over the left,
or tying it up in a ponytail. It was as if
the cause of hair loss was not as urgent
as the way it might now present. I didn’t
tell anyone about the dream until after
I’d had a shower; as a child, I was told
you never made such disclosures
until after a cleansing with water,
as if the steam and spray could wash
away the ominous. If thunder
rumbling in the distance meant
the gods were rolling marbles
or bowling balls or playing
one of their games whose stakes
we could never know, why
shouldn’t I connect the dots
from dream to habit to helpless
waking-walking without any map?
In another story, a man sells
his pocket watch and a woman
imagines the feel of a tortoiseshell
brush as she runs her fingers
through locks no longer there.
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.