Why does the king in the story
keep plodding back and forth
through the graveyard, a talking
corpse with Scheherazade ambitions
clinging to his back, threatening
to explode his head if he doesn't
respond to the riddle at the end
of every tale it tells? Why
didn't he refuse the invitation
to undertake such a task in the first
place? The girl in the story
who sits on the ground in a dirty
skirt, patiently picking each
numbered grain of wheat, ordered
to collect all of them by sun-
down; and the one who stole a taste
of the gods' ambrosia and nectar
condemned to bend forever toward water
receding from his thirst, to reach
for fruit rising away from his out-
stretched hunger. Whatever keeps
returning to test us in life,
we're told, are lessons we haven't
learned. But whose hand behind
the screen writes the riddles, takes
pleasure instructing stage attendants
to turn off the sprinkler system or
raise the branches with pulleys? Who
dresses a body of questions in decaying
flesh and suspends it from the trees?
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.