In a hutch with sliding glass doors, shelves displayed crystal we barely used— serving plates, footed bowls, a faceted soup tureen. But over the years, it became a holdall: a portmanteau of assorted souvenirs and kitsch, their faded sentiments crammed cheek-to-cheek with vials of prescription drugs; a wide- mouthed jar stuffed with receipts. Of other rooms in that house, I remember very little now— only how crowded they were with plaster saints, furniture that had seen better days but that they couldn't bear to throw away. Sometimes, when I look up from these rooms in which I write, I think about light from thinly curtained windows, a view of hills; the horns of jeepneys flying past, their headlights crosshatching the bedroom walls. The yard where we slept in the days and nights following the earthquake, where we fed a makeshift stove with old newspapers and listened to rescue helicopters probing the dark.
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.