When the next door neighbor's daughter caught
her pinky finger in the hinge of the door
before someone slammed it hard, she lost
her voice. She was just six. The finger
itself, against all odds, was saved: someone
having the presence of mind to run
for a towel packed with ice as they rushed
her to the ER. After that, her speech
was never the same again; when she opened
her mouth, words came out nearly
mangled beyond recognition, as if the throat
or voice box was pressed forcefully
through a rolling mill. But as she grew
into her girlhood, her beauty
swelled beyond our own capacity to fix
in language: she learned to smile
again, to sign in air those quick,
bright flashes we'd always be
slower and less adept at comprehending.
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.