Not only do trees talk
to each other, we learn;
they also touch. When they're
in such proximity, it's sometimes
possible the bark on the surface
of their limbs gradually abrades
so as they grow, their branches,
trunks, or roots graft to one
another. The new configurations
can look a bit grotesque—like twins
in a carnival, conjoined at the hip
or belly or nape. Most commonly,
they're called Marriage Trees
or Husband and Wife Trees: cedar
and linden, blackthorn and pine,
one branch twined around the other
as if to form possessive half-
embrace. Psychologists say
it's human nature to look
for what's familiar, to place
your trust in someone whose face
seems to resemble your own.
After more than two decades,
I wonder if my eyebrows
have grown fuller rather than
thinner, if they make a dark
double arch that meets
in the center of my brow,
like in Frida Kahlo's self-
portraits. I wonder if
the mole that's always lived
below the corner of my left
eye has migrated to yours,
or if the width of each
cheek is even as the paper
shape a child cuts out
with scissors, after first
folding it in half.
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.