In the Asian grocery store, tanks with a blue plastic backdrop. Dungeness crabs, pressed flat like soup tureens atop each other. It's not yet the season for molting or mating, so the males aren't flexing their famous embrace that can last a couple of days. It's tempting to read another storyline over natural predisposition—possessivness or some type of complication. Nature doesn't choose or judge or harbor resentment. Harp seals, pandas, rabbits, bears— we say they're ruthless for abandoning their young shortly after birth. We call a hen broody, until the eggs finally hatch; or until other hens in the hatchery catch her awful broodiness, and all fall from favor. I watch YouTube videos over and over during the holidays, to learn how to debone a whole chicken. With the thwack of a cleaver handle, I sever the drumstick joint just above the ankle so I can work it free of meat and muscle. I stuff it with a mixture of pork, ham, and hard-boiled eggs before patting it back into shape and sewing it shut with twine. What I have then is what cookbooks describe as a farce— Elaborate comedy of illusion, the lengths we'll go to keep an appearance intact, armor over the soft jelly of flesh inside.
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.
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