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

Instructions for prospective contributors

This entry is part 25 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

We need less than fifty characters, but be sure to get the depth and breadth and the number of years of your experience covered.

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In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ghazal for Unforgetting

This entry is part 24 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

What was it he needed to read? There was a book on one
of the shelves. He only remembered the cover was green.

88 keys, 11 octaves. After daily exercises,
the lid came down on a felt runner of green.

The first year is paper, the eighth bronze, the twelfth
silk or linen; the sixteenth, a candlestick silvery-green.

What trees grew in front of our first house? One
shed only flame-colored leaves, the other green.

One arrow struck the girl, the other struck the god. He pursued her,
even as her feet grew roots, her arms leafed over with green.

Near the water, there used to be a house of quarantine. On a short
stretch of road, broken shells in the gravel amid tufts of green.

Should your mind quietly open that side door and leave, what
will you remember of us, of our days greener than green?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Pleas/e: A Meditation

Is it from habit,
this attitude
of supplication?
And is habit therefore
merely another name
for desperation?

Votives line
the metal box, six-
tiered, in the center of which
lies a locked drawer with a slit.
Lit up, their amber flickering
is restless and beautiful.

How faithfully
people come to write
on little slips of paper
their intentions, leave
confessions they cannot entrust
to a human ear: pleas/e.

It is the nuns that collect
the prayers of the faithful,
change the flowers
in the vases, the altar
linens; scrape the hardened
tallow from the metal plates.

As a child I watched them
from the cool of a church pew:
filing out in pairs, kneeling
in the nave then smoothing
the skirts of their habits
down on each side

before prostration.
The name of their convent
stated the vow they’d taken:
perpetual adoration.
They sing hymns, but speak
little. On one side of the chapel

is a door with a window grate.
Deliver a letter, deliver a tray
of eggs so they can pray
for fair weather. You might see
the slender tips of fingers
briefly loosed from a sleeve.

Not a hair escapes
their cotton wimples.
Not a narrative of skin
to clue you in. Did they
dance, turn cartwheels
as children? Did they flash

their legs, wading,
in the sun? Did they have
parents, lovers, who implored
Pleas/e— do not abscond
from this world? Here
they kneel in prayer,

chaste/ning in the folds
of a quiet bell— though I
have known them too
to link their arms like rosaries
in the street, and stand before
an army of advancing tanks.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Hearsay

In the marketplace, all the mouths opened
and each tongue had a version of the story.

In the hive, the work of bees builds a complex
of gold cells: each room a miniature story.

How do you know where it begins, where it ends?
And which part is the middle of the story?

At the city gate, the woodcutter, the brigand, the samurai
and his wife— What will you believe, whose story?

Life of endless variation, life of primordial
desire masked as intention. You know the story.

I’ve tried to live my truths. Tend your own dagger,
your sphere of influence; write your own story.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Loose lips sink ships.