Don't you wonder sometimes where
to trace your line, how it is
your forebears came to claim states
or provinces from which they derived
their names? The 1852 California census
lists at least five men citing Manila
or the Philippines as their birth
place—one was a seaman, two
were laborers, the fourth was a cook;
the other two did not list their
occupations. In the crew aboard
galleons that plied the route
between Manila and Acapulco in the 1800s,
who among them were your great-uncles,
your great-grandfathers? Which of them
wielded the compass and plane, laid
brick or peeled turnips in the ship's
dank hold? Which waded ashore
somewhere in Louisiana, sick of dark
nights rocking in the wet belly
of the boat, homesick for sun
and salt? After the World's Fair
and traveling carnivals packed up,
who traded in their feathered head-
pieces for a parcel of land
and a plow, a field of drying
tobacco in Virginia, a dog
and a plate of fatback?
Do you look some mornings
in the mirror and wonder at
the shape of your nose and brow,
the stirring you feel in your bones
for places you vaguely know?
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is 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.