Go, they said.
We'll help take care
of the children.
That first winter, I buy
padlocks, a flashlight, a disposable
camera at the drugstore
so I can take snapshots of the snow
on the way to campus. Don't
go out
with damp hair, I'm told;
or they'll snap like brittle
icicles in cold
air. Before I find an apartment
shared with other
grad students,
I make my first calls from public
phones in lobbies. I clutch
a paper
bag of coins
in one hand and listen
for
the warning tone.
The day of departure
loops in my mind: my mother
and two
older daughters
rising before dawn to board
a cab for the airport;
we all
decide it will be
a mercy to leave the youngest,
still asleep, with our katulong.
What words
did we say exactly
and what sort of embrace ::
before the doors sealed themselves
in place
between us.
Year after year
and it is a decade :: then
two :: then three.
You make
a litany
of what I've missed for which
there never will
be a good
enough answer. I can tell you
about the blur of nights
but not about
the sounds of longing
I'm told escape my lips in sleep.
I could tell you that my life,
narrowing more
toward that cold museum
bend, will never amass adequate
redress :: this body and its relics
incapable of righting
all the scales.
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.