Where I grew up I was taught save
everything for soup or sauce: fins, bones,
the heads of shrimp for their orange fat—
dripping sweetbreads of the slaughtered
animal to bulk up a meal, spread like a blanket
over many days with sizzling onions and
wild lime juice. There are whole towns who've
perfected the art of chiseling lace
out of watermelon rinds, roasting rice
wafers to string with thread and float
from windows on feast days— feast being less about
tables groaning with the weight of food
and more about yoking endless hunger to
the ceremonies of using every part: every inch
of skin, every sinew; each chalky eyeball swimming
in its papery bowl, as sweet as everything else
milked from another body in the world for you.
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.