Of waxing and growing old, of wearing down and away;
common root of seniority and senility. Older
statesmen sport silver hair or hairpieces; grandmothers
tongue their gums before they eat or speak—
We age and can't regenerate new limbs. Our cells,
bombarded by environmental damage and chemical
stress, don't endlessly repair themselves. Lobsters continue
to grow throughout their lives; so do immortal jellyfish.
Are they luckier? When damaged or starving, the medusa
will fold and fold into itself until it shrinks into a polyp,
from which new and genetically identical bodies grow again.
Immortal, meaning deathless, undying like gods: un-
like us, who shrink from strong and straight to helpless. Skin
and spine rolled up, bones sifting lighter than a bird's.
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.