Eadweard Muybridge History doesn't stop though we'll take a few hours to climb into the porthole of sleep, then take out the trash; peel a bowl of potatoes, crack an egg, boil coffee, wipe down the counters, read a book, curse, laugh, cry. I don't know which planets will align with the sun some coming weekend, or whether they'll be visible through the rough breaker of trees. This morning, in the bay, wind carves a high, scalloped path through waves. History is aways turning each crest like that, so we are figures in a flip book or stop-motion film where the horses run eternally in silhouette over the Palo Alto track and boys play never- ending leapfrog. It is 1893, or 1874, or 1833. The woman in the green silk gown and Gibson girl hairdo and the man with his arm around her waist, sporting a thin mustache and tuxedo tails, twirl round and round without stopping for a breath. When the photographer caught up with his wife's lover in Calistoga, he said "Here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife," and shot him point-blank. I've never seen a bison, which is ecologically extinct. But there's an animated sequence from 1887, remastered in 2006, where the animal is cantering over a field.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She 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 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.