Last night's rain gleams dully in patches
on the tarmac, where planes come and go
like fleets of birds with cargo heavy in
their bellies; and motorized lorries wait
to unload all the luggage we carry
with us to varied destinations—
On the flight I took, hundreds of men,
some young, most in middle age, returning
from brief visits home to family; now,
again en route to Doha or Dubai where
they work all year to send remittances
back for their children's education,
house repair, a daughter's wedding,
a funeral, a sister's surgery. Let no one
say we didn't do whatever it took to lift
our own from life mired in the quicksands
of debt and penury, from the thousand
ways circumstance passes for fate
because you can't afford to buy
a ticket out of your history of
disasters. Waiting at yet another
terminal for the next connection,
observe how even light laminates
and crackles; how it oils surfaces
puddling in the pass of bodies
more sleekly fueled, rather than
passing cleanly through. Impediment—
from Latin, impedire: literally meaning
to shackle the feet. Who or what takes
such pleasure from cleaning a plate
of glass to sterile transparency, so small
creatures mistake the gleam for opening,
so the joy of its sighting is swiftly
cut by the ripples their bodies make?
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.