the house smells of rosemary
and cambodian pepper—
they don't necessarily
induce nostalgia,
but i don't need to smell
or taste to remember
those yearnings banked
tight behind the grate.
you are convinced i took
my heart out of my chest,
and that is what made it
possible to leave you
all those years, and travel
to this land of forsaken winters
where, left to myself,
i only read books and did
nothing consequential.
you are convinced i can't
put it back in place again;
or that i don't want to
anymore. nights, when the wind
howled and rattled the ice
ornaments worn by trees,
i didn't bother with plates.
i scooped rice directly from
the pot to my mouth. it usually
took a week to eat all the way
to the bottom. nothing i say
can convince you of the depth of my
longing. I suppose it's hard to see what
a body has to do to keep alive, or
what time has shielded from it.
i suppose it feels like a sea
emptied of all its whale songs.
there are bands of moving shadow;
perhaps boats are crossing the water.
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.