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.
(translation from Filipino of Rebecca Añonuevo's "Sulok;" from Pananahan: Mga Tula, Talingdao Publishing House, 1999)
One morning, I woke myself with a question: for whom and what for am I living? and at once it seemed the loneliest question for which I had no immediate answer. The clock above my head pulses to mete out the hours, to wake those like me from sleep or those pretending to be asleep. The spoon and fork lie on the table within reach of anyone who wants to eat, to help them eat (unless the table gapes from hunger and from being lashed by sunlight). The fan, the lights, the earthenware stove, the flourishing orchids outside the house, our house, the store at the end of the street, my mother who wakes and sleeps in order to cook and do laundry, my father who likes listening and butting into the stories my sisters and I share, the barangay captain, the newly constructed waiting shed, the new day after a hurricane which once again sank a large boat, the cheerfulness of Sinatra songs I played over and over last night in the hope I could keep hope alive, the church and market and plaza, the man on the cross, the beggar sprawled face down on the cold and hot cement, the farmers and widows, my countrymen who work in other lands, the children singing and dancing and going to school, the soldier, the revolutionary, the priest, the teacher, the poet, the lovers— all of them who know what their living is for. I wish I could pretend, stroke my breast and with a confident voice offer a profound answer to elicit a public ovation. I don't envy everyone for what they know and the wisdom they have. Why do moments like these arrive unasked for, and yet you wade in solitude, dark and gloomy desolation, the kind you hide from the world so no one suspects, its cry that of a child you'll muzzle and press to your breast until it stops breathing.
At a table in the open air market, the farmer asks us to guess which colored eggs come from which chickens— off-white, copper brown, green and blue. The arugula fronds are not wilting yet in the heat. Tomato clusters boast their firm, ruddy shine. I read somewhere about the earlobes, and how their color matches that of the orbs the farmer's wife collects in baskets from the coop. How amazing it is when signs tell the truth though more often now, they could be duplicitous; when a dream of combing bees out of your hair turns into pollen-dusted stigmata on your palms, but when you open them, they start singing a song you can understand.
Tonight there’s a thunderstorm warning— chance of hail and rising wind, though all day generous sunlight winnowed through impossible blue. On my weather app
I track what mornings and evenings are like in other cities of the world— Charlottesville, Raleigh; Chicago, Baguio, Manila. I can imagine how light breaks
where my loves lie, perhaps in bed. Perhaps they look out a window, streaked rust-orange as a rooster’s crest. If someone has discovered the secret to being in more than one
place without breaking, I would like to know it. I would like to walk in a soft, forgiving rain.
I dream that preparations are underway for your arrival. It feels so imminent and so real, in the dream I completely forget that it is a dream. Thunder sounds on the rim of hills surrounding the town. The sky gradually darkens, but inside, the house is warm and filling with fragrant clouds of steam from gingery broth and white rice. The table has been wiped clean and even the neighbors have come to set the table: good plates and silverware, tulips in a glass pitcher. The stove holds a corona of flame in each burner, and the kettle whispers: any time now, any time now, any time now.
In the craft of poetry class where only three or four students talked and one was always excusing herself to throw up in the bathroom, the only ones that seemed at all interested were the student with a hearing aid, the political science major, and the student in the film program. Most days, only my voice filled the ticking silence. Questions hung in the air unanswered. No one made a move to slide pen on paper or type notes. I wanted to say I didn't care, I'd let poems fill the hour and fifteen minutes any way they wanted, give them room for their sweep and cadence, their little rooms inhabited by frogs and quiet ponds, their patterns in sixes, their one step forward and two steps back, their meander and sprawl like sumi-e brushes loaded with ink under a brilliant moon. There were days I'd walk out of the room thinking Am I done? Should I just stop? The resident falcon swooped out of the sky and rested on the art building's roof. On the sidewalk, seagulls fought over the remains of someone's breakfast sandwich in a crumpled wrapper. The book return bin looked forlorn and empty. Everyone was either buying boba tea or espresso drinks in the cafe.
