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

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.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Brief Panorama, with Flowering

The root pushes up green shoots.

In the lot at the end of the street, visible bands of magenta.

First the crepe myrtles, then the pale tree lilacs, then magnolias.

We exclaim at their suddenness, their exponential amends for absence.

I want just for the moment to think only of this—

Something like profusion, something like a surplus, please not soon taken away—

Not the effort it cost, not the blind tunneling through softening loam.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Have a nice day.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Interruptions of the actual

This entry is part 7 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

 

In which finally the warm cast of sunlight pierces the skin around the heart.

In which we discuss how many cups of water are typically poured for one bath.

In which I try to explain how history is never absent; or how I am still learning not to flinch every time someone says a name which is my name yet not my name.

In which we are called to the jury window but cannot reveal to the person sitting next to us what has just now come over us with sadness.

In which the child walking with his mother down the sidewalk runs to a clump of blooms and excitedly chants yel-low yel-low.

In which the animal behind the wire fence comes up to take the cube of sugar and I want to ask of it my fortune, my not-yet-spent.

In which I measure the space between my thighs and wonder at the hinges in accommodation.

In which, arriving home late afternoons, somewhere in the steps taken between laundry machine and sink and pantry, the body resigns its dreams of rest.

In which I arrive at the conclusion that the word Mother is not a factory or threshing floor, not vessel or raft, not well, not cavity, but something more: I have no name for what is infinitely and always open to the elements.

In which I smooth the sheet and affix my signature.

In which I dust the charred heads of my wooden gods and line them up by the sill, because whatever crouches in so little space must crave any form of expanse.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.