we talked of the future idly,
cracking watermelon seeds between
our teeth as we flipped through
crumpled pages to get to the sunday
comics. believe it or not
was one of those things we fully
believed: like magic, like layers
of brass or copper rings that stretched
the necks of women as they went
about their tasks in the fields;
or how, after water vaporized
inside faults during earthquakes,
it turned into gold. believe it
or not, we still live in an age
of alchemy. A conveyor belt runs over
sixty miles in the Sahara desert,
& you can even see it from space.
in the absence of box frames, bees
have been known to build heart-
shaped hives. now that the future
is here, why is it so much harder
to stick out an open palm & believe
that whatever falls into it is a whole
unto itself, little world without flaw?
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.