For a time we were lucky; we still had books and notebooks where we could write a record of the days all day, if that is what we wanted. There was a yard, so we could measure wire and garden stakes, buy soil in bags that we then added to the soil that lay in its natural state around our homes. For this was the irony of the world as we'd come to know it for a very long time: how it was poured out and packaged in parts for purchase, and then even the things we thought we owned were being sold to us. How appropriate that purchase came from the Old French porchacier which means search for, run after, pursue. We'd run out of coin but not out of tears. And there would be no end therefore to our searching. Our hearts gave way repeatedly, as one violent day slid into another as if without separation. And yet we wound and set our clocks. In the dark we listened hard for the bird whose voice we'd heard at that hour in the morning.
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.