Unshipment
is anagram for punishment—
meaning the package
sent overseas never arrived,
every square inch filled with made-
or-bought-in-the-USA goods; meaning
the smells of 100%
percale, clothing
from outlet stores & discount
racks, shampoo & instant coffee
pilfered or stolen
& never declared. & after
all that, you are considered
the selfish one, the one
who forgot her roots in coming
to this
America that everyone still
thinks is the land of plenty,
where everyone eats
the food
of the gods
& is never on welfare or coming out
of a bankruptcy.
*
Isn't it peculiar
how the gods always interfere
with human affairs:
jealousy & lust,
chasing after maidens in a Looney
Tunes universe where they
turn into showers
of gold or bulls or swans—
Ten humps in,
the appetite fires up again, restless
for the next conquest. Meanwhile the girl
is rooted to the spot or turned
into a lowly creature hanging
by her own
thread.
Net, hum, spin— & it is
a woman as well that's blamed
for lifting the lid of the box: without
a sound, a cloud of ailments
rises into the world & circles
every outpost. One last thing lies
pent, hums in
the dark bottom— there
it is but you don't want to be
the one to call it hope.
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.