When I look at myself
in the mirror one day to find
puckers and dimples and grooves,
I remember my first
glimpse
of my mother's body as a woman's
body: lean
and damp from the bath,
the curve of her nape like a violin
scroll, the towel slipping off
her torso as she bent to pick up
a pink powder puff.
She'd ease
into her brassiere, slide
the nylons up her thighs
and click the straps
of the girdle in place.
How much work
it seemed
to keep up this surface of
pulchritude: outline lips
in the shape of a perfect
bow, the brow's
twin arches
and the eyes with a feathering
of kohl. Perhaps I have let
myself go. Perhaps I've
guzzled too much
of salt
and sweet, craved the buttery
comfort of fat, finding there's
pleasure too in the lick and slick
of dapple.
Even now, she has cheekbones
that others say are to die
for. Late bloomer, I
touch a stick
of color
to my lips, purse them into
the tapered shapes of boat
or leaf. Every now and then
someone will say
they can see a resemblance.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) 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 was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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.