America, it's been a while
since we've taken visitors
downtown to the memorial
of the general who wore
his sunglasses like he was
in a commercial and not
that southeast Asian theatre
of war where soldiers impaled
babies on bayonets, thrust
their dicks into peasant women
and, in the heat of April, set
thousands of gaunt prisoners
of war on the long march from
Bagac and Mariveles to Camp
O'Donnell in Capas, Tarlac.
The docents will point out
the general's effects
and the famous picture
of his dramatic Leyte landing:
striding knee-deep into the surf
as cameras click away. America,
this is you with your stern jaw,
somehow dwarfing both the archipelago's
president and the little statesman
barely five feet and four inches
in his dress shoes; this is you
saying I have returned. By the grace
of Almighty God our forces stand
again... in the blood of our two
peoples. After Liberation Day,
my father, already in his early
thirties, climbed up a tree
so he wouldn't have to share
three whole bars of Hershey's
milk chocolate. As they rumbled
into town in their jeeps, American
soldiers had thrown these and packs
of nylons by the handful at people
running and cheering alongside.
My father laughed, recalling
that he'd staged his own kind
of liberation in the bushes.
O America, you've left and
returned but have also never
left. Your companies continue
to harvest ore and tobacco
and pineapples. You play war
games in Apocalypse Now sets
of jungles, then go off-base
to pick up bar girls in Olongapo
or Angeles. Some of them wind up
like the tragic heroine in that
typical operatic ending: she
takes her life because the foreign
hero who was supposed to return
left on a boat to find himself
a real American wife.
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.