dives toward the light again, a kamikaze pilot. What I mean is, I recall the slightly crazed contestants in Takeshi's Castle, running through a maze and aiming for a platform that swings above what looks like a blender full of mud. Meaning, how everything depends on getting to the palace, really a fortress dipped in DayGlo colors— while in the under- brush, other players make garbled noises like a million scraped knees on gravel, or parachuting moth wings. In every quest story, it's not so much what for or what it's worth that the hero goes through crisis after crisis—Individuation is what they call it: how a stronger, wiser self supposedly emerges after each test, dusting off the rubble, straightening her suit of Teflon, all limbs still hopefully intact. At what price, this light that scintillates? How much, if only for the splinter that drives itself so deep, I cannot ever forget it.
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.