"When we build, let us think that we build forever...."
~ John Ruskin, from The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
"The beauty of a place is welded into us..."
~ Romeo Oriogun
Mountains, too, are architecture.
The highest ones hold centuries of sediment
and rock, handprints of those who carved roads
and resting places. Octaves of fiddlehead fern,
papery trumpet flowers; trees from which
revolutionaries belled their bodies
in the wake of cannon fire and shipwreck.
There's a city in the midwest and a tower
overlooking a river, its walls
studded with stones from distant
parts of the world. One carries
the bloom of blood spatter,
like other stones from a beach
in Corregidor with a view of Caballo
island. Another comes from
the ruins of Cuartel de Santa
Lucia, turned barracks in an old
war. For what do we change such
fragments into monuments
that catch afternoon light
bouncing off the water?
When I came here, I thought
I could shield part of myself
from the disembodiments
wrought by exile— fold it in
a bit of cloth or a box, keep it
from conscription into
the kind of labor demanding
exchange of what tenderness
remains, for these mirages
of flint and steel.
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.