The poorest man in the world turned himself in to the French police a few years ago, for making unauthorized trades on the stock market. You don't really know what that means, as in all your working life, you've never had the luxury of what's called disposable income. And that man described as the poorest man in the world looks nothing but: holding a thin mobile phone to his ear, clad in some kind of torso- hugging zipped lycra shirt. There's debt, and then there's debt of another kind, more than coin that anyone could borrow to keep lives afloat. That kind is harder to repay though it seems to slip through our fingers, unwriteable like water. There's weather, or rather what weathers you: condition of need flayed repeatedly, panic of small movements until you stick a hand in the gaping wall. Something is always pouring through: a deluge, a fire-flash. And between one and the other, you swing like the lub to the dub of a heartbeat, from laminar flow to reckless turbulence.
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.