Sometimes you uncrease an insert
from a book you took with you
when you first crossed
the ocean--- plan of your city sketched
by the famous architect from Chicago,
pressed into the rocks five thousand
feet above the sea; nests of fiddlehead
fern thinned and transferred to concrete
boxes along the median. In February,
thousands pack those narrow, winding streets
to watch light glance off the many-
petalled floats: orange champaka, stiff
rust of everlasting garlands; school-
children daubed in paint, hefting
crepe paper-wrapped arches above
their heads. Light is often lost,
passing through the prisms of exchange;
distilled reflection in that world
built as weak image, or so they claimed, of another
in the west. Had you lived in that older time,
would you have understood it was your body
that mapmakers numbered with legends, part
after part: rivers, railways, public parks,
mile markers set along the mountain
road numbering the distance from yourself
here and that version in the future
always just ahead? If you held
the map under a lamp and laid a piece
of vellum over it, you could trace with
a pencil all the places you still
remember--- the two magnolia trees
in the neighbor's yard before someone
cut them down; the empty lot
filled with waist-high grass. The public
school painted urine yellow, thick
afternoon fog rolling in like a sea.
Raw laugh of a gecko watching
from the eaves. How afraid you were
of leaving, perhaps never to return.
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.