March 29, 2021March 29, 2021 by Luisa A. Igloria

Poem with Spring Rain and Ephesian Goddess

Wind all night, and thunderstorms. I can think of no other 
purpose for disturbance than disturbance, in the same way 
you could think of the mind as the most obstinate refusal 
for its own liberation from itself. Aren't the tulip trees and
Bradford Pear again in flower; and the dogwood and sweet-
bay magnolia; and soon, the leaves and darkening syconia 
of the fig, drooping like fleshy sacs? You might say we've 
weathered and are weathering still. In the frenzy of rain 
or hail or the froth of seawater, what mouths tilt even more 
widely open? In the beginning, the mother goddess wept
for all her children thinning to bone across the earth. One 
breast she milked for blood, another for salt; from the rest, 
rice pearls and blankets, tea, dollar bills, silk gowns and 
bread. But the billows don't stop; their hunger remains.

Luisa A. Igloria

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.