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

Immigrant Time

This entry is part 8 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

After you left, what did you think
about the world that lay beyond the rim

of the only city you’d lived in almost
from birth? What did you think of the sky

you found extended beyond the tips
of airplane wings— that it would sift

snow fine as dust, whiter than flour
on your coat-sleeves, and still

you would never grow cold? What
did they tell you of how to endure

the solemn procession of years, the small
interregnum of time, the nip in the waist

and catch in the throat before the hourglass
spun to measure the grains all over again—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Don’t let the dogs smell your fear

This entry is part 7 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

Dear father, I remember when you
first said this to me: we were walking
along the road that led from Palma street

to the City Hall where you worked, and we passed
the pink house that no one ever lived in except
in summertime, when its rich owners came

from the big city and the wrought iron gates swung
open to their VW van and black Plymouth Barracuda—
They had no mastiffs on guard, but every other house

had a dog snarling and chained to the stoop;
and mangy strays that lurked in alleys might circle
our heels, their ribs like sad dry accordions

running out of air. My small hand in yours, a cry
ready to fly from my mouth: but you lowered your voice
and taught me to steady my walk, not to show them

the fluttering pulse like a moth they might tear
from the throat of my fear if I gave them a chance,
if I gave them the chance to come that near.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Metro

This entry is part 6 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

It was also my father’s city, legend
at the edge of the bay, walled
before history’s dismantling
as bombs fell from the sky.

I do not recognize
how it looks in vintage
photographs: the graceful
boulevard, the parks and plazas

from another century,
blueprint of someone’s colonial
dreams that flowered in delirious
heat. And it is hard to reconcile

these images— avenues with neat,
lettered signs: botica, sombrerería,
panadería; itinerant but well-
dressed vendors— with choked fumes

from standstill traffic, the stench
of a city rotting from the weight
of all it can no longer bear,
but from whose dwindling

stores the greedy want
to ferret every bit of shine
and wealth, snuff the strength
to spit in the face of the state

and its lies. Most of all, the poor:
vagrants who knife, sharp-shinned,
through narrow spaces between cars to knock
on sealed windows with fevered palms.

I used to walk from work late at night and see,
huddled under a bridge or by a canal in the glow
from a nearby high-rise, bodies seeking
repose: the old, the young, infirm—

sheeted in newspapers, mumbling
in sleep. How could we want any differently?
Don’t we know how it feels to lie, so public
and helpless, beneath the heel of a dream?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear Emissary,

I must warn you that what you will see
are the rapidly assembled facades
corresponding to the press release:
their tropical flush, their fresh coat
of paint– Bodies will throng the boulevard,
a respectable distance from front rows
of movie stars-turned-politicians
and other celebrities. Beyond them,
you might glimpse the haze that blankets
outlying suburbs and valleys, the glint
of tin roofs where most of us shelter.
O but yes, the wonder of trains
bisecting the city, towers of glass
and concrete sheltering the 24 hour
call centers of the world. The beggars
have been disappeared, and the flower
vendors, and the squatters under the bridge.
The state is the mother of fear. And the state
of fear is harder than the diamond ring
on the president’s sister’s finger, is a color
redder than the famous sunset tinting the bay—
but you might never know it because an entire police
force, especially your contingent, has been ordered
to wear adult diapers beneath their issued fatigues.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Paranoia.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

12 Prompts

Write of the fire that swept
through your gut and what it asked or took;
of the first thing you thought and the last
that you spoke before what changed you;

write what you were at ten, at seventeen,
at twenty, now; and the sounds of weather
and trees in the towns you passed through.
And tell of the smells in the streets

and the tastes that burnt your lips
and your tongue, of the eyes that locked
onto yours as you walked through a door
before you turned and the world

turned with you. Tell of the first time
death came to touch the linens in the room,
how it stained with blood and fluids
all the maps engraved in the wood

of the floor; write who it was
that scrubbed till the heart ceased
with its stubborn weeping and grew
a shell of echoes. Write

of the omens you read in the field
as the sunlight burned and the frogs
lay in stupor in the ditch; how a seam
split the earth as you buckled to your knees

till the trembling passed. Tell of the stars
that reeled and spooled overhead, how they swung
their censer then as they do in a widening arc:
shadowing your steps, night after endless night.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Something takes a few steps and stops

This entry is part 5 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

Forget the scolding for the milk
that curdled in the jar, the whites
of eggs that would not rise—

Forget the lapse in weather
that made you, too, forget the time
beneath the haze of heat and open windows—

The water skims and purls,
retreating after it washes over rocks.
That is the rhythm of all approach:

that halting, uncertain, sideways track
toward what the heart wants so very much
not to frighten away with its need—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Prayer

Let the billboards and the monuments of dictators
break to make nests for every kind of migrating bird

Let the moon rise like a new eye in each empty
socket to flood the plains with unaccustomed light

Let unruly calligraphies of green erupt
from every town and city strafed into the ground

Let smoke from incense sticks and chants of mourners
haunt each soldier and each suicide bomber in the afterlife

 

In response to Via Negativa: Discursive strategy.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

I miss everything that passes

even before it has passed: the dish
so beautiful in its glazed countenance
before the knife cleaves into its center
and portions out what each was supposed

to have; the nectar before it disappears
from the hummingbird feeder and the slight
swing from the motion of shy wings
I almost never get to see; drip of water

down the eaves, film of green fallen
on the surface of the lake; newspapers, jacket
sleeves, shoes, scarves, random parts of lives
scattered below the transom after the blast.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Missing.