"Everything has two handles: one
by which it may be carried, the other
by which it can't." ~ Epictetus
On a day of continuous rain, I start
again to make inventory: the shirt
that no longer buttons in the middle,
the trousers with broken zippers.
But I would rather try to bring shine
back to the scuffed hardwood floor
than put things in either of two bags
marked donation or trash; would rather
sweep up the dust and wipe last night's
cooking stains off the counter. We're almost
out of rice but the fig tree in the yard
has showered us daily with fruit. All
the money I earned in summer is gone,
but work starts again in three weeks.
We have possibly more books than I
could finish in one lifetime,
but since I've started slowly reading
through them, perhaps this doesn't strictly
qualify as tsundoku. My horoscope says
memories weigh down my thoughts; and so
I might find myself overreacting, discarding
items from the past without remembering
how much they mean to me. Sometimes
the moment between one effort and the next
is loud as the alarm triggered by a trip-
wire. Sometimes, it is the briefest
shimmer of quiet when I feel my ghost
unlatches: it walks around the kitchen
island without picking up a knife to slice
tomatoes, without gathering into its arms
a warm new load of laundry with that faint
human smell which soap can't quite dispel.
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.