A scritch in the eaves, in the dark
of earliest morning; the tumble of a soft
body I imagine has slipped from a tree—
Whatever it is bounds away across
our shingles. Though I strain to hear,
there don't seem to be any sounds
issuing from a throat, desperate
to loft signals for help into the air.
I tense for them, despite: signs
of a body already in transit, oblivious to light
lifting in the canopy. The bulb
of an ankle, purple-streaked, swelling
with fluid. Walls hardened around organs
that float, islands in a sea of carnelian flowers.
The crown of a weed is its own miniature
sun of reckoning. As for us, we're helpless, pinned
against the fabric, faces upturned. If only
we could hear the sound the soul makes escaping; where
it slips from this net into the unbroken.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 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; 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.