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

Catch

It startled me to hear the child say she feels
every feeling when she walks into rooms.

It made me think of a long brown coat I loved to wear:
how I knew every dent in its buttons, how my fingers loved
its capacious pockets.

I have had forebodings too, several times in this life.

Once, a man sat across a blazing bonfire,
combing his long hair with his fingers.

You can imagine something before it comes true.

Once, a man held a child
away from a rushing lorry.

You can close your eyes and still see
the outline of the moon.

All that the will asserts
is the measure of what we can’t know.

 

In response to Via Negativa: The Grays.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Among spirits

Shimmery ghost
faces bloat the water
and thicken the reeds

Theirs the thin
scritch of a hinge
in an upstairs window

Theirs the old-
fashioned names that match
the heavy silverware

The blinds flutter
like rows of helpless moths
when they pass

For them we fashion cars
made of paper and paste, tiaras
made of dark-eyed seeds

For them fat bankrolls
of Mickey Mouse money, the smoke
unwound from Cuban cigars

A boat in the shallows,
two coppery coins
dropped in the hold

 

In response to Via Negativa: Night barge.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Apocrypha

“Excuse my not/ waiting as others do/ to be.” ~ D. Bonta

Every clock in the house shaves off
too little or too much, but none

arrives at consensus as to the nature
of what winds around and around itself

like a maypole. I walk to the river
to investigate abandoned shells,

dry pods, serifs drawn by the feet
of wading birds: they’re never afraid,

no matter how many times they step
into the river’s text.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Carpe diem.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Politic

This entry is part 9 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

 

Half a moon in the sky, suspended
as an earring from the tree.

And the mind flies to make a perch
out of meaning—

Meaning choices have been made,
between some idea of ornament

and an idea of loss; between the card
of membership and the polite

rejection. Diplomacy:
the faintly vibrating net

electric in the gap. Or
all that will ever remain unsaid.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Stores

Is that all? asks the sales clerk. These days I want to travel lighter and lighter. It is probably still too much, but I haven’t yet detached from some ideas of comfort— What is it today? a vial of lavender spray, a shampoo bar, a packet of herbal tea. We used to have a small kitchen with an ancient refrigerator. A gas stove with four burners, one of which did not work. We boiled drinking water in a dented kettle. On cold days, we heated water for baths. In a pewter pot, coffee percolated. We bought a local blend from a stall in the market: they ground the beans and poured the grains into oily paper sacks. Oh the luxury then of instant coffee— if not Nescafe, then something mother called Hillsbros. Cleaned out, the bottles held a variety of condiments. Or kept in storage something for that day of gaping lack. Rows of them lined a shelf beneath the counter: dry rattle of mung beans for a rainy night; salt, cloves, bay leaves, pepper. In another, sweetness that would need prodding, hidden in hard curls of cinnamon stick or pods of anise.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Message without bottles.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Small fires

This entry is part 8 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

 

In the middle of a great sea
of people I want to recede
into the flickering of one
cellophane-colored flame.

*

The amber in a faceted glass
throws off light: alternately it sings
of ash and dusk-skinned fruit. What
were you saying again about clarity?

*

When the doors opened, I hailed you
by name. As you turned, the frames
of your glasses snagged random
filaments of neon.

*

Do you have an extra coin? Time
is that period between markers,
is still what ticks between
the increments we’ve paid for.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The world is wet

at this time of year: torrents
fall across town, on the main street
and its crowded manifest of store
fronts, the vendors taking shelter

under flimsy plastic awnings.
When lightning flashes, the spill
of diesel from passing trucks
makes momentary iridescence.

I am not, at least, lashed to the mast
of a boat adrift in the heart of a hurricane.
Even the dogs are grateful to go indoors
where they can whimper from their caves

of sleep. Headlights of passing cars
sweep across the middle of restless
dreams. And in the hills, even the bats
fold themselves into rows of dark umbrellas.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

On Graydon

It was the year we found the apartment
a block away from the church— The bits
of communion made of fresh baked bread, wheat
that warmed the famished tongue. Mrs. G,

the landlady, opened the door with a brass key she took
from a chain in her duster pocket. What is your job,
she asked. Door after door, the ritual of opening. Behind one,
a claw-footed tub. Radiators that hummed through thicknesses

of paint. We took the first floor unit on the right.
Across us, a couple who liked to smoke on their balcony
ringed with potted plants. He liked to toss
his cigarette butts over the railing.

At dusk we saw Mrs. G come down
to the sidewalk— She picked up each stub,
past smolder, and aimed. We wondered if they
ever noticed the grimy squares at their feet.