We were taught to eat with
our hands, the whole hand; to scoop
rice and fish with all the fingers
and not just miserly thumb and index,
scrawny bird beak pecking through
gravel for leavings. A person
who knows how to eat like this
must be generous and forgiving,
no? Not afraid to get sauce
and grease on their fingers,
not ashamed to show who's boss
of their own circumstance
and lick the last traces
of honey and salt or garlic
oil. When I was a child afflicted
with blisters and allergies,
my mothers took turns coaxing
me to eat a little more.
While distracting me with stories,
they'd shape small cubes and pyramids
out of sticky rice, hide bits of meat
or vegetable inside like treasures
buried with the Pharaoh, who was
sometimes though rarely a woman—
Like Hatshepsut, who despite a chronic
skin condition built temples and monuments,
brought wealth of ivory and gold
from other lands. Sometimes she wore
a fake beard and man's kilt just because
she could. After she died, it's said her
stepson tried to erase all official memory
of her: doesn't he sound like a hater?
Whereas she's someone I can imagine
tearing the meat of fowl from a joint,
relishing fruit, washing everything
down with a generous gulp of wine.
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.