All roads lead to Rome, or
back to the terminal in the
concourse where your original
departing flight was to leave
exactly on schedule—Except
flash floods on the ground in
Georgia meant a band of storms
heaving violently over the map,
interrupting all plans. Didn't you
just drop your bags off? Do you
know where they are at this point?
Loneliness is waiting with so
many others, & realizing the
names taken by the agent
off the standby list aren't
plenipotentiarily yours. In
queue again: but for what, you're
really not sure anymore. There's no
semblance of logic except the swift
topple of dominoes. All the world's
Uber drivers circle arrivals, none
vacant for long. You're still stuck.
Weather's the culprit this time: not
xenophobes, not the perpetual gridlock
you remember from Doctor Who—hover vans
zooming around, looking for the fast lane.
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.