The wind-up doggie keeps popping its head up: not even real but a fur-covered plastic shell in a pink plastic basket made to look like the real thing. The additional $39.99 you were charged for adding door reversal to a refrigerator purchase: so it opens from left to right instead of the other way. Meaning, two centuries ago the servants of the rich might go down to the frozen pond to chop blocks of ice for hauling into straw-lined ice houses. The 5.3 liters of water needed to produce a single- use water or soda bottle. Meaning the 145 school shooting victims in just the first half of 2022, plus the 21 victims and 9 wounded in Robb Elementary School, Uvalde. The game in which you're asked to guess how many beans are in the cup, how many tears fill up the lake. The almost 11,000 hate crimes against Asians self-reported (mostly by women) to Stop AAPI Hate, between March 2020 and December 2021. Meanwhile, you keep lists. The spring loads. You are tired of researching lists, keeping lists. Your eyes are heavy with the world.
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.