The ears, two snails stuck out of habit on either side of the head. The nose, windbreak in a field no longer at war with itself. Declension of the chin that in the past rested too long in the bowl offered by the hand. Citadel of shoulders from which no doves cry at twilight. The knobs on the back which at night still flutter toward the idea of wings. The stomach's small vessel: wide-lipped, eternally open-mouthed, purple as eggplant and stitched with a hundred and more ways to say I want. Hinge of the hips complaining in the wind at weather's approach. The knees, two slightly dented potatoes lifted from the dusty floor. The ankles' twin mounds of prayer, quiet before the feet make contact with currents in the earth. The eel suspended in the middle furrow folding forward or back: sometimes it flattens into a pasture of sleep; or curls, uncertain light of an unborn child.
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.
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