Noodles with bread, rice
with bread—just part of
our inscrutable, redundant
nature. Or, is it that cheap
sources of starch are easier
for the immigrant to come by,
compared to cuts of meat and
filets of fish? We go to
Asian markets where salmon,
bass, and shrimp are cheaper
per pound than at regular
grocery stores, where the price
of one bag of bell peppers is
equivalent to the price of just
one at Harris Teeter or Fresh
Market. We gut and scale
the fish ourselves, and keep
the heads on shrimp for the bits
of precious orange fat in their
cheeks. We are the original
inventors of snout-to-tail,
having used through history
every part of the animal
to sustain us in our need.
Every birth and death
and occasion in between,
we mark with miles of blood-
stuffed sausage and rice cakes
smoked in banana leaves; and
always, we set aside mouthfuls
for all our ghosts, shake
drops of wine on the ground
for wandering spirits and
guardians of our hunger.
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.