You recognize them in countless cities you've
passed through; witnessed speech and gesturing
in markets and airport terminals, in languages
you recognize. They like to make a kind of
pilgrimage to famous churches in every place
they visit, perhaps the way something felt
like obligation so you walked to the Baguio
Cathedral even in the pouring rain, that one
time you returned after close to two
decades away. Inside, it seemed brighter
than you remembered: the exterior walls
once painted a creamy egg yolk now
a shade of muted pink, a gilded resin
angel lifting a bowl of cloudy water
by the door. There was that one time
you joined a line walking to the nave
where a life-size statue of the crucified
Christ was taken off the wall then laid
on a velvet-draped bier, just like a real
corpse. Like the others, you touched your
finger to the painted hollow of the wounded
palm, a nail-gashed foot. The faithful—that's
the word always used—beat their breasts,
pressed their lips against oiled wood.
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.