I am always alone
in the abandoned bell
tower of myself. Whoever
used to come and keep
company has withdrawn.
In one of the corners,
perhaps, is an earring
I lost sometime ago.
I could not find its gleam
though I searched high
and low. But always,
a rope asking to be
pulled several times a day
so the clapper can kiss
the surface it hits.
If there were ever
servants who cleaned
this place, it must
have been several
lifetimes ago. Dusk:
the only cloth that buffs
these surfaces, faithfully.
Morning light brings
noise and lists, bodies
that don't want to get up.
Night is the chanting
monks pour into rivers
of endless suffering.
I am trying to fit
into the space between
the landing and the swing.
I am trying to only be
the silence of no
longer trembling, a weight
at the end of a string
pointing toward the earth.
The quiet of no longer
tensing for the sound
of the next blow
to come.
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.