"Every day is take your knife to work day.... "
~ Lo Kwa Mei-en
What prior thing makes
a mother? Silver dragées
filled with hormones,
the womb's cross-section
pearled with ruby-colored
seeds? The flint table
that used to be a heart
before soft bodies lay on it,
unaware of the coming sacrifice?
Today I found a box that held
a colony of olive beads, shorn
from my father's rosary.
Ten of them used to make
a mystery. I learned to ply
the in-between with needle
and thread, cut the excess
between my teeth until
my tongue bled. Don't praise:
I don't maintain a clean kingdom—
it's full of upsets, the daily
untidy labor piled on by birds
as they fly by, unmindful
of who suffers their shit.
From that height they're only
abstraction, line drawings
on UNESCO cards that sell
at 75% off after the New Year.
That is, I won't just be
a soft feathered breast,
a milky eye, a cooing.
I admit: times I'd like
to surrender this equipment,
retire into some sanctuary
that others freely enter
and exit without minding
the pass of time, or whose
voices are crying out
at the end of the line.
But what seeming
impossibility–this
being the stronger knife
against which I test
mine every day.
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.