The surface is the first thing: entry, door, coat rack; what kind of front room. How it extends into the garden, why the hallway light is always going out. How many windows there are and what direction they face; why there is an unfinished section on the upper floor. That's the time you ran out of money and had to send the carpenters away. For many years you were ashamed to let people in for fear they might see that rough space. There's nothing there, you'd say. But that's not quite true. There's furniture: the extra bed that might have gone into a corner, a plain wooden desk for the window; a closet full of sheets and blankets, fixtures for a toilet to the right of the stairs. Next to the that, the sometimes drafty rooms where you actually sleep at night, under a roof with a few loose shingles that bang against each other in the wind, spread over both everything and nothing the same way as this life.
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.