"Love means you breathe in two countries."
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
I have very few pictures from there
but now and then I look through them
to see how light falls like a wound
refusing to heal. Sometimes I think
sepia must be the color of love:
that means the length of a breath
quickening the distance between this
moment and all the ones in which
we haven't yet made our lives harder
than a rusk of bread to crumble
in a cup of coffee. Now, I find
an insomnia of stars buried in
the flesh of fruit. I pick at the white
pith that spreads like a net
across a globe I can hold in my hand.
But is it always going to be
too late? A month before you were born,
I walked the hills by myself
in a heavy sweater, watching my breath write
unreadable letters in the air. I still
can't figure out whether they spelled time or
estrangement or anchor; or were merely
random shapes of a future refusing to be read.
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.