there are too many mirrors or none at all in hallways painted white or green or blue. The bones of trees resemble bodies of fish picked clean by an orange mouth and a hungry knife and fork. And salt is the wound that rubs itself raw until its fingers are hot like a pan that's just emerged from a fire. In the story of your life, the moon tells the same story it has told itself and you for years: that your common love— of the air, of towns where women sew cunning stars onto moody fields of indigo, of horses that pause, nostrils trembling in the dark— is the fruit whose price you'll pay every time. In the story of your life, you will stay not because there's nowhere else you could go, but because only here could you reap the voluptuous fragrance of its rare flowers when they came; and only here lay its pieces on an anvil made strong by tears. But owls call through sleepless weeks asking the wind for anything that used to sing of green, for mountains whose skirts have not yet been unfastened— With your hands you'll weave again a basket of rushes; you'll take from your breast and cover the light with a striped blanket then bend down and pray to the water to take it downriver, far away from here.
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.