What occasions the particular flare
of memory as I open my mouth
to the dentist's scraping, the rough
sound of the handheld electric burr
and calculus pulling plaque deposits
off hard-to-reach back teeth? Of all
things, I think about the total
number of years I've been married
(counting the first time), and how
it now exceeds the number of years
I've worked at my current job. In either
case, tenure's precarious: something
arrived at through daily calibrations
of teaching, research, service.
Ideally, each must feed into and not
crowd out the other. What of love?
Ideally, the heart and the head
and the hands do their thing in concert.
And though the premature display
of valentine hearts and candy in drug-
stores sing every variation of two,
the labor going into any kind of work
still singularly comes from you. How
and what do you have to shoulder
every day? What makes it even
possible to carry what we do?
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.