In those years when the fog
still trailed through the long
arms of cypress, on the way
home from work you'd pass
a bookstore with the name of the opium
poppy; or was it the Spanish poppy—
emollient bloom on a stalk of slender
green? And next to it a quiet
row of stores, one in which an old
couple brushed ink on scrolls
and laid out rows of jade biscuits
threaded through silk cords
for luck. A doctor sat
on his front stoop, rolling
a joint. The ridges of hills
were not yet filled with clap-
board houses painted blue
and pink and yellow. In those
years you knew the number of steps
that led steeply from church,
and the bright red sheen of the star
on the lone gas station marquee.
When does a place detach
from the cord that used to tether
you to its markets teeming with cabbages
in carts, fish spilling like silver across
counters of tile? You don't know
when or how time folded its accordion.
You can still draw its shape, but clumsily.
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.