~ after "Ladrona de Lunas," Armando Valero
Half-moon blade, mezzaluna, edge
I rock back and forth across
the face of a wooden board: my best
instrument, how I tune you according to
the tides. How my breasts float like two
new planets above your central hollow,
veiled in the colors of sunrise. I am
sharper than rock, more subtle
than steel. The sky and its collection
of dead stars lies quiet around my
shoulders. I've lain my spine across
your length: a birthing chair,
intimate with my blood and fluids.
Every child I've brought into this
world comes through the two points
of your smile. And at night,
I rest my chin in your dead center,
both hands ready to pluck
what light I can before it steals away.
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.