- after Leonora Carrington's "And then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur" We wished to tell her of certain buds that bloom only one night of the year— about how, when at last they raise their heads, the perianth opens and the ivory wings of petals fall away. Finally, from out of one of the glass balls we rolled into her lair, some seed must have broken free. The ceiling rejoiced by building a softer canopy of clouds. The garment her father was always trying to unravel stayed faithful to her body. We witnessed how she had not burned herself into coal, how the years of solitude had merely curved the points of her horns into softer filaments resemblimg those growing out of the sex of flowers. We were as curious as she was about the guide dressed in gauze, dancing to a melody only it could hear; it pointed toward an archway through which soft sepia light spilled, as if from the mouth of a bell.
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.