except too many of them were coming true.
Today, news of dams broken in the night,
buildings toppling whole into newly-opened
ravines filled with water. A famous novelist
said in a news interview that she'd been packing
a Go Bag; recently she bought a rifle
as part of her preparations. I remember
when everyone was adding "and zombies" or
"with zombies" to the ends of every sentence.
Should there be silver bullets
and machetes in those bags too? If he
were alive, my father would probably throw in
rosaries and a flask of holy water, brought back
from Vatican City by a wealthy cousin who traveled
the world and fathered a child in just about every
port. The stories are that his wife attempted
to sprinkle some of that sacred water
on the philanderer's dick while he slept,
perhaps hoping either that he would reform,
or that she'd cause equipment malfunction.
How naively we take the world at face value.
Three days' worth of water, a week's worth
of first aid supplies. water disinfectant;
lightweight blanket, flashlight and batteries.
Wet wipes, dry or rehydratable food. What luck
to get out with only the clothes on one's back, with not
a rip on the surface of skin. How astonishing to see
all that made up a life float away, then watch scavengers
collecting all that the dead won't need anyway.
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.