"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe." - János Bolyai (1802-1860) The optometrist asks you to look into the autorefractor: two dark lines form a road that stretches from where you sit to a red barn at the horizon. If your brain tells you that you're looking at a point at infinity rather than just mere inches away, it helps the eyes focus. Things have to end somewhere, don't they? In projective geometry, you're told two parallel lines will intersect, will meet at a point in the line at infinity. If you tilted the horizon up or down, it would remain what it is. If you turned around, infinity would still be there as an infinitely beckoning horizon. But what a strange idea: how in that world, another traveling along the same line as you at parallel distance will arrive with you at the edge of the world. Maybe you can't see them now or touch them. Maybe they haven't spoken to you in months, in years. Maybe you move along, uncertainly: an inch at a time, imagining the possibility.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and 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.