For years I suffered from daily nosebleeds. They happened so often, the teacher barely looked up anymore except to hand me a wad of toilet paper: best not to be a distraction to the lesson, best not to stain clean writing paper with splotches of red. As instructed, I went to sit quietly in one corner of the principal's office, where someone patted my hand kindly, or reminded me to tip my head up and apply pressure on the side of my nostril. Half an hour of counting the ceiling tiles, of guessing who might be passing through the corridor by the shadow they cast on glass jalousie blinds. And the taste— mineral oxides that poured down the back of my throat until they pooled. If you don't learn the color and taste of your own blood, you might not learn anything either about the nail on your little finger, the inside of your elbow, what you turn to when you close your eyes.
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.