"Every day we pass the anniversary of our own death"
~ Sean Thomas Dougherty
Not just of what tried to kill you
but failed. Also, in what ways,
including unintentionally.
Obvious ones, like the sharpened
pencil in the hand of a jumping child
missing its mark, the parcel
that exploded in the mail room;
how you passed the last marathon
mile before the road turned
into a sinkhole.
You were in seat F
when a truck bearing
a load of scaffolding material
punctured the bus windshield,
skewering all in window seats.
A flash flood
carried people in a car
away, their faces
against the glass
like in a disaster movie.
But mostly, the quieter
ticking in thickets of blood
underneath the surface,
scales wrapped around
throat or heart muscle—
All that you don't even see
yet keeps you awake
at night, listening
for breath until
the sun comes up.
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.