We don't own a TV yet
so my father accepts the invitation
of his cousin the former mayor
to come to his house one
street away and view the moon
landing. At school, in Science class,
all the teachers can talk about
is the first humans who will set foot
on the moon--- The weightlessness
in space, the heavy suits
the astronauts need to wear, topped
by a bubble through which they'll breathe
bottled air. I can't imagine how
much fuel they used to push
spacecraft into the atmosphere.
All the adults in the room
clink glasses as if at a wedding
when they hear one step for a man, one
giant leap for mankind. But what I'll
remember most is the landscape
pockmarked with boulders and craters;
the magnificent desolation of that
Sea of Tranquility.
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.