of a certain age raise
eyebrows when she says things
like That's dope, or This carousel
of life would be so much more fun
to ride if they gave you the dark-
maned stallion and not the sparkly
little pony. I mean I have nothing
against sparkly. But aren't you too
just a little bit tired of how every
store that hasn't renewed its lease
at the mall has been turned into
a selfie wall? Giant wings, a painted
swing under a fake bower, rainbow
umbrellas with glow-in-the-dark
raindrops. My hero is Yayoi
Kusama, who has always been
a woman of a certain age
even from the time she was ten,
when she obliterated the image
of her mother in a kimono
with her signature army of
hallucinatory dots. Or
the Bakunawa, typically
misunderstood in all the tales
that describe how it swallowed
the seven moons and would not
give them back. So much
brilliance, one for every
day of the week— who
wouldn't be enamored?
How is anyone to endure
eternity without a store
of heat and light, a steed
with muscled flanks?
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and 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.