Yes, I am still writing
about my mother. About my
mothers. About the ways
in which they became
who they were to me; but
long before that: to, for,
and from each other. How
not even the years can fade
the quality of their scent,
the gestures that remain
embedded in every piece
of furniture, in every green
ceramic mixing bowl that survived
the years of their marriage to make
its way into mine, with all
the hairline cracks spread across
the surface. Yes, I am still
writing about my questions, about
the thousand thousand ways a whisper
carries even in the absence of wind
from out of the depths of a cabinet
emptied of its secrets. Because
the end of a story is only
convention, because convention
dictates whose names may appear
on registers and documents
and deeds, as well as who
doesn't get to inherit.
But inherit we all do—if not
the shape of an eyebrow
then the places moles turn up,
giveaway signs on the map
of the weathering body: saying
you too have a penchant for men
of a certain age, or you too
love the texture and frill
of a garment for the way
it seduces the mind into thinking
it might forget what histories
groped and penetrated you in that
loamy dark before you came to be.
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.