Into each row I lay: melting
snow pea, baby grapes, summer
squash, eggplant. Ahead, weeks
of dazzling heat; then rain. No
roosters crow at dawn in this
part of the world where finally
we set down if not roots,
then a household of belongings
unloaded from a truck.
There are no fences behind which
tethered dogs growl when
I pass; or steps carved into the side
of a rocky hill. I don't walk
to the corner store at first
light, lured by the idea
of bread in makeshift ovens. Once,
I believed there would be time
yet to make our way to those
places in the world we only
dreamed about: rivers winding through
the underground, fireflies strung
like party lights against the ceiling.
Trails that lead up and up into
mountains so high our legs might
start to feel unconnected to our
bodies; trees crowning past the ribs
of their green umbrella arms.
Now these little runners of hope,
close to the ground: in a few
weeks, small heart-shaped leaves and
curling tendrils. Memory, that box
of rusted tools I keep: testing
how sharp the blade, how deep into
the soil the weed wrench's jaw will go.
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.