Author: Luisa A. Igloria

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.
Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

In the hotel with thin walls and the name of a poet,

This entry is part 3 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2015

 

you hear the busboys hail each other
on the sidewalk after midnight. You hear
the man expectorating in the bathroom of Room 101—
the sound he makes, like someone drowning on dry land.
If it is true there are ghosts, you want to wait
for the one of your grandfather to materialize
and lead you by the hand down the grand staircase,
past tables laid with silver and candelabra
to the kitchen where he cleanly severed
the joints of fowl before he cooked them
in broth with ginger and squash. If it is true
that the rain will never cease, then the trail
of ants will lead from the hibiscus in the yard
to the bowl of honey in the larder; and you’ll eat
spoonful after spoonful so as to never fear
the mold so freely papering the ceilings,
and thus keep it from ever taking root in your lungs.
If it is true, that dream you used to have of hovering
over a billowing sheet in the shape of a sea: then
the green and white days in its aftermath
are only a pause, a door in the garden
through which women in evening dresses
have gone in search of the transcendental;
and into which, consequently, the long afternoon
siestas of childhood have momentarily disappeared.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Where we live

Over slow-simmered, vinegary dishes of tripe and pork we listen to tales—

of the watershed plowed through by a local politician’s earth-movers,
and the soil loosened around the base of trees. When they fall
it is not from the axe or the chainsaw but from this thing
they call development.

The dazed houses lean upon each other for support.
The cherubs that flank the cathedral’s main doors sport new
coats of golden paint, but the bowls they hold out are empty.

In the window frame, a spider-thread collects drops
of damp tribute: condensation from days of unending rain,
and inside, from the heat made by our own bodies
though we can hardly remember what the air

smelled like, untinted, before the wilderness ceased singing.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Peuple inhabite....

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Crickets

Some nights press
like a hand at the base of a throat.

We do not know when
precisely to enter the chorus,

but a kind of vibration
holds our sails open—

And we press back
at the darkness, wing by wing.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Return

Not the trees, not the river that cut
through mud-bloated mountains—

Not the deer that once heralded the cold,
sweet waters with their grazing—

Not the gods that sat, soot-
blackened, in their stone circles—

None of these greeted us at our approach:
only the choked houses cloaked in rain.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Hive

In room after room we found bags of clothing
that she could not bear to part with.

They looked like giant cocoons
where wings of all colors lay trapped, unmoving.

Arranged on the baluster: a row of perfectly positioned
umbrellas, their silks twirled up and fastened.

The red-framed windows held hundreds of seeds
of rain— each one, precursor to the next.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Hourglass.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Bone Song

After all flesh is flensed,
the shape of the fish

is leaf, or the hull of a boat—
Flattened and dried

to the hue of balsa, whole
schools swim in waterless air.

In the dried fish market,
it’s hard to disregard

the certainty of what
they know: smell and taste

of sun-dried putrefaction,
gifts of salt and leathered skin

the body wants to hold on to
for as long as it possibly can.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Diagnosis.