Sometimes you try to find a way to explain how you do it or why— Kind of like the way a food or recipe tester, say, might boil hundreds and hundreds of eggs, set timers at 6 or 7 or 8 minutes to see which gives the jammiest center for ramen, which makes the perfect little breakfast orb to lower into the cute egg cup and tap on the head with a spoon until it shatters; which yields the least chalky yellow center for smooth deviled eggs and lively egg salad sandwiches. Is it disappointing when you can't explain such a need in terms of white oleanders or the soft, impossible fuzz on the cheeks of peaches, those kinds of things that others might have praised for the whole orchards they see flowering in the skin of a thing simply cradled in their hands? Not that you can't also be tender like that, or give a different flavor to burning wood. Through a closed door or a medium mistaken for a barrier, an absence of thought: the reverberation of some far-off machine still sends audible signals. Think of all the riddles you've ever been given to solve— There's a chamber walled in alabaster with a tree or carousel or snow globe at its center. Nothing can climb in or out. Or there is only one way to get in or out. Your desire is to have it whole, a geometry where nothing is subtracted, even when taken away.
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.