We stay up to watch until the end
of the Oscars because we want
Parasite to win. It does, not once
but four times! And this triumph
for an Asian film, an Asian director, gives
me so much pleasure I want to make
a bowl of ram-don the same as the lady
of the house eats all by herself
though she told the housekeeper
it was for her son. It's in that scene
just before everything turns
on the blade of a knife
and the hinge of a sliding door
leading from the secret hideaway
in the basement. Her daughter smells
the sizzled beef and thickened sauce
poured over the noodles, and she comes
downstairs. She calls the mother
selfish for eating it all by herself,
not even asking anyone
in the household (though she means
herself) if they want some.
And that right there is what it is:
there is only so much anyone can take—
the poor in their flooded hovels,
the closeted, compartmentalized:
everyone playing costly charades
just so a few can swim in a marbled
bath streaked with white like a piece
of wagyu steak. The rest of us
will write letters in the dark,
happy to eat from tins of dog
food if that means our survival.
I saw a documentary of an artist
who boiled and drained ramen noodles
then knitted each strand carefully,
day after day, in a museum. She
wanted to slow down time, raise
something cheap and ordinary
almost to the level of high art.

Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) 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 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.