Growing up, I hear whispers
but no one will tell me to my face
I never wonder until I'm older why I'm seven
before I'm taken to church to be baptized
The house always smells
like fried onions and garlic and oil
and when I come home from school
there's a plate of rice with chopped
hot dog pieces Mama T and Mommy S put
in front of me alongside a glass of Orange
Fanta When I don't remember how to spell
remember I cry all afternoon
because it made me lose the spelling bee
My prima Jean wants to use my new set of 64
crayons with a sharpener built into the box
When I don't let her she stomps her feet
and hisses in my face You're adopted anyway
I'm confused sometimes about why I must call
my aunt Mama T and my mother Mommy S
They love each other so much one of them
takes her and her whole family to live with us
because she couldn't bear
the sight of her undiapered babies
crawling on the rude stone floor of a hut
When her children grow up they get
the clothes I've outgrown and I know I shouldn't
but I feel like I've been displaced
When the other goes back to school
she decides washing dishes or clothes
will give her hands tremors and that
isn't good for all the writing
she now has to do working for a degree
From one I learn how to measure the water
for rice And from the other
how to make the cursive for capital
T and F One is like a boat
with a fringed canopy The other
looks the same only it has
a rudder for steering at one end I wonder
can one travel farther than the other
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 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; 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.