List the places
mothers shouldn't aspire
to be if they want to make sure
their children don't turn out
failures, forgers
of checks, degenerates;
prone to violent
outbursts followed by year
after year of exponentially
increasing unhappiness.
One of these days;
mark my words, said friends from work.
They didn't mean take a piece of chalk
and draw a circle around every
other one.
They were talking about children:
mine. Which means they were
also talking about me.
Certain ruin
was the curtain with which they wanted
to darken the view from every window.
Inside, trained birds lisped
the impossibility of joy.
But I'm tired of feeding
animals
dried kernels of sorrow, or tearing
hanks of bread to throw into water
that should reflect
lIke quicksilver— a surface
that doesn't break up the changing
light into points as much as it
proliferates like spores.
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.
I love this. And congratulations on becoming my poet laureate.
Peter, thank you! Hope you are well.