"What more could I ask of the dark
than just to be the dark itself?"
~ Sean Thomas Dougherty
As days shift and nights deepen,
what has not fruited has begun to rock
itself to sleep. The leaves of our favorite
trees are shriveling. Speckled with brown,
now they are leathering. We cut back
the barren vines; we deadhead the roses
and hydrangeas. I used to know someone
who liked to say that the goal of each day
was to climb into bed and sleep the sleep
of the just— Even then I wanted to know:
the just what? I mean, doesn't the wind
leave ripples in its wake though the trees
are naked, though the only lights on water
are whatever stars it manages to catch in its nets?
When you are sleeping, I reach across the sheet
as if toward a light that scaled the walls,
that leaped upstream like a fish remembering
origins. Now and then a flash of green appears
on the horizon, though we've been told
there isn't anything there but light, refracted.
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.