Noon with its white horse and houses of plague,
evening with its shrouded owls. Biology
of illusions. Everything we wear and shed
and shoot, borrowed from the ransacked past.
Domes of churches glow pink in the sunset,
made beautiful by all these curtains of smog.
In their shadow, vendors with oily trays
of beads and amulets. There used to be a zoo
somewhere in the heart of the old city:
emaciated elephants, drying pools where
they kept a mermaid dressed in verdigris.
I wanted to ask her how to tune this instrument
that seems designed for continuous mourning.
I wanted to ask her about how to be in two
places at once: the heart swishing in
a mason jar, the womb-space bluing the water.
In response to Via Negativa: Circadian.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) 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 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.