All I want is more time; nice if in the shape of a reading room,
zero emergency phone calls or text messages, with a plain
bench and uncluttered desk. But would it be unseemly to also
yearn for a karaoke mic for belting torch songs when one's
capacity for solitary endurance has reached its limit?
Except I'm currently stuck in the flaps of this mood; can't
ditch it for good, despite light therapy. You know
women aren't the only ones afflicted. Given the global
environment, everyone I talk to seems on the verge;
vulnerable, feeling all the feels. We commiserate, mostly.
Food is also diversion: nothing like old-fashioned pigging out;
unlike the fakeness of that Peloton commercial in which these
good-looking, what-do-they-need-to-work-out-for-anyway people
touch a screen and, voila, simulate a slalom down winding
hillsides, even if they're in an uncluttered room with a window
sleeker than a giant plasma screen. They hop off, gushing
I'm changed! The price of that glowing makeover machine
runs over $2K: more than an adjunct's monthly salary; or
just a bit more than the cost of a new fence. And we need one
quickly, or before winter does the old one in. Things are so
killjoy like that. What I want, what I need: though I've said
pah to every Black Friday sale, another kind of void, a secret
laryngitis, makes the soul feel scratched, hoarse; or worse,
opiumed into silence. Weariness, wordlessness: almost
made from the same disheartenment. Remind me again of the
numinous: that reverent feeling, entering a temple or mosque.
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.