In a famous experiment, the infant monkey
taken from its biological mother is given
a choice of two surrogates—a wire mother,
or one rigged of rubber and terry cloth.
Wire mother has the bottle dispensing milk,
and cloth mother has nothing but its soft,
nubby surface. It's easy to predict
the ways this story will be told;
so clear that the organizing principle here
is one assigning maternality to certain
traits assumed to naturally reside
in a female that has given birth to young.
If the mother, still anxious and groggy
from labor and lack of sleep, at first
pushes the tiny, rooting mouth away,
does it necessarily mean she'll have
no love to give? Years ago, preparing
to leave my children in the care of
relatives so I could go to graduate
school in America, I was called
selfish, self-centered. Even the man
on my fellowship interview committee
took one look at my information
and said, But you're a mother! as if
that should settle anything and every-
thing. Another colleague said, Mark
my words. It may not show now, but
there'll be an effect on them. Meaning
something like those infant rhesus
monkeys after being left with a wire
surrogate: some stared at the ceiling
or circled their cage; some engaged
in self-mutilation or even wasted
away and died, after refusing to eat.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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.