I can't remember the source
of a quote scribbled in my notebook:
"Why should the thirst for knowledge
be aroused, only to be disappointed
and punished?" Something to do
with Prometheus, famous fire-
stealer; and the eagle or vulture
the gods sent to feast every day
on his innards. The liver
which the bird pecks at replicates
itself and is whole again by morning,
for the point the gods seem to want
to make is that they can do
the same thing over and over
without having to consider
there could be a different result:
you in your place and me in mine,
but you wear the chains, bro.
Until, in the next part of the story,
Heracles kills the eagle and frees
the hero dear to those who consider
themselves revolutionary.
That his deed is meant
to illustrate the arrival
of civilization is cultural
anthropology. In other words,
the difference between the raw
and the cooked, though this
has been shown to be largely
accidental: a pen full of pigs
catches fire and opens the door
to a world of cochinillo and pork
belly buns. And I remember
that one of the earliest
things my in-laws and I
bonded over was a dish
of pan-braised liver
and onions, cooked down
over a low fire, which no one
else in the family would touch.
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.