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~ Cigar Factory in Manila, 1899
Everything, as you can see, is done
by hand: the plowing and sowing,
the harrowing and weeding.
In the valleys of the north
and south, they pick the leaves;
they dry in sun, by air
or fire or flue. How many palillos,
how many manojos travel by wagon
and are spread on factory tables,
the leaves as brown
as the hands that sort and roll
them? The smell---the smell
that clings for days and days
to their blouses and sayas,
that they inhale more
constantly than salt-winds from
the coast. When you close your eyes,
can you hear them cough, see dark half-
moons under each fingernail, feel
the leathery pelts they pull into tight
rolls that others will ember and burn?
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) 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.