Nightly I visit this book, this story,
wondering how it will end; it keeps
winding back to a group of frames,
to a time before the fruit in the tree
had not fallen and cracked open
like a wound on dark ground, to a time
after her lover's ghost took two sips
of coffee tainted with the poison of
certain death. Even the ghost of the cab
driver wondering who phoned the garage
at six every Friday evening keeps
coming back. How do they do it,
and not lose their minds? When she
finally entered the house again,
she'd twirl her wedding band
and engagement ring absently round
and round; loose even then, or
because she always had long, tapered
fingers. She liked to boast about
her tiny waistline, how she looked
in her wedding dress and there was no
mistaking they weren't doing it
because of a so-called accident. She grew
to like tapping the chiseled points of finger-
nails on the table whenever she was bored
or was allowed nothing more to say. But
she knew how to scream and moan: she'd work
herself into such a state that fainting was
always the logical next step. Thinking
of her now, I can only see that wound-up
energy with nowhere to go: the points
of her knees, the edge to her voice, all
of her youth and possessions lost, her mind
a skittish bird trapped in the fire.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. 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.