Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. ~ Wikipedia What if half of a random pair of latex gloves chanced upon on the verandah is the very thing you need to pick invasive bugs off the persimmon tree? And what of synchronicity, as when you rebook an earlier return flight then get home just in time to hear news of a long dormant volcano's eruption? It spewed such thick gas emissions, all airports shut down from impaired atmospheric visibility. Mabuti na lang, you say to each other; it's a good thing. As if a voice whispered from the asteroid field of your brain to say, like Luke Skywalker on first seeing the Death Star, I have a bad feeling about this. The important receipt turns up faded but still readable and dry after the laundry cycle. A lump in the breast is merely tissue thick as a spoonful of cold oatmeal, not a ticking time bomb. So many narrow escapes, so many little windfalls for which you're grateful—as if an unseen hand rights the wing mirror and a lurching vehicle crosses your blind spot, so in the nick of time you manage to get out of the way.
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.