They've found a new moon
the size of a car, which
for the last three years
has been orbiting the Earth.
It could be a piece of our
moon, shorn off by some kind
of impact; more likely, it's
an asteroid randomly traveling
through space, that got
ensnared by Earth's gravity
and in that moment became
a moon. What does it mean
anyway, to be in relation
to another? A mother gives
birth to her young then licks
the vernix off them. She may
eat the afterbirth as well,
if that means protecting them
from predators drawn by the smell
of blood. Did this newly
discovered satellite winding
disheveled loops that look
like yarn choose to attach itself
within our orbit, the way
we speak today of chosen
rather than birth family?
Sometimes it feels like we are all
just bodies drifting in space,
the rise and fall of our breath
silent as the words we
long so much to say but can't
for fear the damages we've
inflicted on each other have made
a ruin of the universe.
How will this new moon stay
on this wobbly track, how
long before it slides off course,
blinking in faint goodbye?
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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.