Collateral Damage

It was a summer of sprung planks and loosened rivets,  
of riven floors and stopped clocks; the twinge in a shoulder
reminding you of the recurrence of pain. It was again
a murderous season: that season of unnecessary deaths, 
of cruel indifference. Repair was a gate that sagged 
at the bottom and scraped the earth in the same place
with each swing. Chaplets of roses grew threadbare 
like linen; all night a bee drowsed as if stoned on the edge 
of an ivory blanket. What else crept under carpets of clover 
toward our trim hedges? Every night we went to bed 
like apostrophes folded into each other. That is to say, 
even in sleep our hands spasmed in terror or prayer. 
Call it anything but casualty, accident, or fate
— none of us grown wiser for turning away.

Luisa A. Igloria

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.