Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 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.
The woman in the video cuts a head of cabbage into wedges, sears them in a skillet.
Butter browns and sizzles. She flips them over and waits for the other side to char.
Some aromas from the kitchen take me back to another time.
Memory is a slow cooker sometimes; and at other times a deep fryer.
If you rub a lemon slice across your fingers it takes away the garlic smell.
Pour water into the half-shell of durian and wash your hands in that basin.
I have heard groups of women whispering about another woman using words for musk and stink, flesh and fruit.
They're the type who warn that certain fruits, when eaten during your period, tinge your blood foul and sour.
In the foothills of Mt. Banahaw, there are legends of a woodland deity. During a famine, she gently pinched the sides of poisonous fruit and made them sweet.
The anthropologist who did field work in the heart of the rainforest proposed that cooking food marked the difference between nature and culture.
When we are children, we taste the world in what we pick up with our fingers— dandelion leaf, serviceberry, green plum, water from the rust-slicked mouth of garden hose pressed against our own.
They run rampant in these coastal neighborhoods. We heard scratching within the walls, saw droppings
beneath the kitchen sink and in the damp basement the landlord doesn't bother to light properly.
We found a bag of scones on the floor, chewed clean through. We're told to get rat poison
and see if that will fix the problem. Some come in tubs labeled Just One Bite. Active
ingredient, either bromethalin or warfarin. Up until the turn of the last century, arsenic
and thallium were also used. A skull and cross- bones sticker indicates lethality: Danger! Fatal if swallowed, inhaled, or absorbed through skin. The poison causes internal bleeding, nerve damage,
pulmonary edema. Death can follow: not immediately but fairly quickly or it might take a few days.
We found it twitching in the corner, making sounds that might be interpreted as both snarl and shriek.
Not us but pest control came to take it off our hands. Meaning a dispatch, or a deposition.
- after “The Fall of the Rebel Angels,” Peter Breughel the Elder, 1562 and “The Lamentation of Christ,” Giotto, 1305
Sprouting gills and lizards’ tails, rebel angels change in their fall from the shining walls of heaven— becoming horned and feathered beasts, hybrids of irregular size. Poisons of the puffer fish, the scaled, the seven-headed; and though they’re meant to stand for what is dark and evil, their beauty still is terrible to behold. Pistil or tulip bulb, zebra swallowtail butterfly with a body of burnished hair; the gleam of shields and swords raised for lethal strike. In Giotto’s “Lamentation of Christ,” more notable than the mourners who have taken the body of Christ down from the cross is the army of cherubs hovering like small planes, their grief becoming blur against a thick impasto of clouds and sky. Once I heard a sermon which said sacred scripture shows God and the angels have feelings, but more intensely than those of humans. Never fear, said the announcing angel to Mary— which meant his countenance was far from benign, even if he was holy. In the depths of our own grief as we wring our hands and rend our hair, our keening ascends into the air as if, too, from the mouths of angels.
"US Mint presses final pennies as production ends after more than 230 years." - Associated Press, 12 Nov. 2025
Penny wise, pound foolish; earner of an honest penny yet you swear you don't have a penny to your name. Won't you buy hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny— too proud to pinch a penny yet you'd wager someone a pound to a penny. Pretty penny, clean and shiny as a new penny, have you ever felt like a penny waiting for change? Me too. A penny saved, a penny earned, but now there are no thoughts you can buy with one penny. Somewhere in the world there are bathroom floors and kitchen floors tiled entirely in copper pennies. Those take a long time to complete, but once you start, it's in for a penny, in for a pound. The gleam's as good as gold, even brighter— for every single time a penny drops, a lightbulb still goes off in someone's head.
If small insects like the jeweled ladybug sent out a cry for help, would you hear it? You remember a nursery rhyme from childhood about a king who stuck a fork into his dessert, releasing four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. But if they were truly baked and done for, they wouldn't be able to fly out of their tomb of shortcut pastry, would they? And since they began to sing in chorus, they must have had nine lives or there was some wizardry involved— the type that sets off snare drums, broomsticks falling briskly in line to empty trash bins and carry buckets of water. What padlocked the doors to bewilderment and surprise in your blood and held up a stop sign every time you saw a swan and recalled tales of transfiguration? The snake doesn't whisper Sit in the corner like a good child. In that kind of story, it urges you to take a big bite out of the shiny apple, bets you could steal cheese from a mousetrap or filch a smoke without being caught. People have lost big in TV shows where the host asks you to choose between wads of money or a taped-up mystery box containing... what exactly? Perhaps you are the insect— just a small creature, and not large as allegory like the one in a Kafka story. You do your everyday things: fry and eat an egg for breakfast, swim a couple of laps at the gym, dutifully take out the recycling. You squint up at the fading light one evening, and remember how in your teens you really wanted to learn the bass guitar, rack up enough points to join the local Mensa club, or train as a long-distance runner if not for being flat- footed. No, none of those, to your dismay. But the voice of some wise sage says in your ear that it's alright. Neither you nor the barnyard creatures nor the bright blue Morpho butterflies nor the earthworms churning up the soil older than all of us necessarily need saving all the time. Your daughter texts you to say that one day, when she took her second-grader to the park, she was feeling so burned out from work. She joined him on the slides a couple of times, and felt a little better. You tell her— next time they visit, you'll drop everything you're doing so you can go to the teahouse you enjoyed so much the last time, to drink oolong, eat finger sandwiches, popcorn chicken, and scones.
"...on Nov. 5 ... doctors in the Philippines have documented the case of a woman whose armpits leak milk." (Reddit)
In 1847, Russell & Sturgis acquired tax-free rights to carry 250 tons of ice on the frigate Hizaine to Manila, variously called the Pearl of the Orient or the Rome of the East, or more recently the armpit of the world for its urban blight and overpopulation. In the 1800s, blocks of ice were harvested from creeks and lakes in deep winter, then covered with sawdust or hay for insulation in ice houses. The great Banquet of Malolos celebrating Philippine independence in 1898 flaunted a European-inspired menu, as if to show the world the newly formed nation was as civilized as others in the West. Seven appetizers, seven courses and four desserts— oysters, shrimp, stuffed crab and buttered radishes; cold ham with asparagus, cheeses, jams, leche flan del mar and mantecado— ice cream! The milk was likely coconut or carabao milk, and of course it needed to be kept cold. Any milk, including breast milk, spoils when overexposed to heat. Bacteria convert lactose into acids. Fermentaton thickens into a moist and foamy surface spackled with curds.
I had a couple of intricately beaded necklaces. One of them was a gift, years ago, from my eldest child. When I looked at what I had in the drawer, I couldn't remember which one was bought by me, and which was a gift from another.
I gave one to the giver, who felt hurt I didn't remember, more than that I was returning the gift. The mind's like that: forgets the details, though archives are kept by the heart. It's only one of many faults for which I must atone.
One was a gift, years ago, from my eldest child. Giving something back, the hurt is that I didn't remember. One was bought by me, one was a gift from the other. That the gift was returned, her mind found unfathomable.
I mailed it back to her, and she was hurt I didn't remember. I might have forgotten details, but isn't what the heart keeps what matters? I returned the gift, but not out of spite. My mind isn't that kind of stupid. And yet it's only one of many things for which I must atone.
I may have returned the gift, but I know it wasn't out of spite. When I looked at what I had in my drawer, I only saw too much. Perhaps it's only one of many faults for which I must atone. Once, I ran my hands over two intricately beaded necklaces.
