always have best choice, first choice,
and they're allowed to change their minds
but we can't ever be fickle— we're mere
mortals after all, and fools to invoke
some sort of urgency like the heart,
so if winter has been here forever,
how much do you think spring
will cost because from experience,
the cleaners always make a killing
once they're corporatized, though I
would so like to be a woman of more
than domestic and womanly service
and sacrifice of parts because I know
in the end, Death redeems nothing; and
still the gods always have the best
choice, a choice in weapons for war
and for marketable words; in women,
in wives, in boys they also take
pleasure in as well as animals
in the forests and fields like dogs
or oxen or pheasants or swans,
anything with a neck that can both
bend and snap; and the waterways
are littered with the afterhusks
of all the choices they made
before they changed their minds
before a previous set of choices
so now we have to talk about
resilience and climate change
and ocean rise while they keep
harping on their days of glory
when people and things knew
their place and the parties,
the parties, weren't they wild
and fabulous— though it's not
clear anymore if there was a true
before and after, because we also
got confused: and didn't Yoda say
Always two there are, no more
no less: a master and an apprentice
and we know he was talking about a Sith,
so what's up with how the gods always
have at least two sets of names, one
supposedly for use in those kingdoms
overshadowed by whitewashed palaces
against skies and seas of tourist blue,
one for that kingdom from which our
notions of legislation and law
and the virtues of the middle way
were supposedly drawn— but who
actually knows why Hercules was
Heracles, Artemis was Diana,
Mercury was Hermes, who's also
associated with Prometheus... or
am I mixing them up and being
an unreliable witness, and I say
witness for haven't they also come
interfering in my own affairs, some
cop on beat peering lewdly through
the open car window to ask if everything
was alright as I sat, right breast exposed
and feeding an infant on my lap; then
there'll be those making impossible demands
like which half of your child or dog or cat
or house or some other form of beloved
would you most wish to keep after it
has been severed in half or kidnapped
by some tyrant of darkness, but if
your hand so much as flew up to cover
your mouth in fear or alarm or made
a fist as if to strike out or protest
then god help you, they'll say, god
help you, which you know is code
for you are so so very on your own.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She 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 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.