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

Please Explain How Flowers Are Essential

Each year perhaps there is at least one
new thing to learn, even if in the manner

of an error. The ways of the world are mysterious
but not to the honeybee who is wiser by far

than the so-called intelligence that decrees
what is or is not essential to the industry

of golf courses and corporations. Once I bought
a bouquet of stargazer lilies, sunflowers,

asters, baby’s breath for a writer who came
with stories to share in our speakers’ series—

When I turned in my reimbursement receipts,
I received a memo: Please explain how flowers

are essential to the mission of the university.
Of course I was flabbergasted. But the bees

could have told me. I should have listened
closer to the alarms in the hive, the soft

crumbling of door upon golden door as they left,
the dusky odor of sweetness now nearly forgotten.

 

In response to Via Negativa: How to Tell the Woodpeckers.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Excerpted Index of First Lines

Morning like a trail of prints leading to the garden
Morning outlined with snow
Morning that does not return to close the gate
Noontime of uncertain temperament and direction
Noontime when the weathervane cannot tell north from south
Northerly direction which underwrites a hidden star
Novena for migrations into the unknown
Odor of impermanence, delicious behind each earlobe
Oiled patina on a loosened slab of wood
Orpheus, doomed to a lifetime of returning glances (not her)
Otherworldly as return address
Ovation of vines supported on the trellis
Persistance, poetry, privation, protest

 

In response to thus: small stone (268).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Flower

This entry is part 22 of 23 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14

 

Seed these words
in your everyday speech—

Acanthus or helichrysum;
indica, milagrosa, javanica;

perforate, constellation, for no reason
but that they introduce

a break in the aftermath of repetition.
Drone of some large, unseen motor

outside our windows every night
after midnight, bearing neither trace

of gold nor verdigris: you do not lead
to a trapdoor through which we might lower

our bodies into a waiting boat, damp seats
skimming prosaic language off our clothes

so they thin to the embroidery of chance,
texture of a different possibility.

The landscape opens like a tapestry:
under the moon, farmers roll

their cotton pantaloons and sink
toes deeper into the mud.

You would think young shoots
give off a uniform sound every time

there is a planting: o of surprise,
ah of falling and letting go,

allowing the dark to swallow
each body wanting to burst

toward the harvest,
arcing toward the stalk.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Signal No. 3

This entry is part 21 of 23 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14

 

After the first onslaught of wind, hail the size of golf balls, we heard the radio alert. Is there a safe room beneath the stairwell? Is it large enough to contain the plants seeded at all the children’s births? We would need to loose them under the light of a yellow moon, then anchor them with ivory amulets. Nothing in the dispatches tells you how you must learn to sit still, in the dark, until the mind grows quiet: until the eerie searchlights of danger diminish into soft two-note voices and the rain can be ordinary again.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Volta

What worm leaves a trail of milk
on the undersides of leaves, what finger
traces indecipherable names on a plane
of frosted glass? O steady pulse

trickling like sand through perfect halves
of the hourglass— Stalks droop along
the weathered fence: memory of wisteria
where there is now no blue. No shrouds

of periwinkle fall: gorgeous veil
like shreds of indivisible water.
This is how we know something else
is coming: after the fever-burn,
the hands on the clock face start over.
The frozen world breaks into dew.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Thaw.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

from Ghost Blueprints

5

Will you not be a letter in flight, a bird,
long years morphing into sequences of gold?

Will you not be a pool unruffled by the suffering stone,
unmoved by the face that must stare to rival its own?

Will you not be a flowering spear, garden aroused
from slumber by sound, a rain-filled and viable day?

Will you not be the measure of shorn-away years multiplied
by the net of some larger ardor, unfathomable by the eye?

Will you not be the lever, the door, the moon; gauntlet
unthrown, unraveled thread that will lead to its source?

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

from Ghost Blueprints

This entry is part 31 of 31 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2013

 

4

For snow, at Christmastime, we thinned
sheets of gauze and cotton to wrap
around arrangements of dry twigs
in oversized vases— We took

our sweaters to don inside the mall
where we could pose for photos
against the chilled slab
of an indoor rink, cutout

backgrounds of iced over
cottages and stenciled sleighs
foreign to our tropical clime.
When I first walked into the bone-

chill of a real winter, new
friends warned: my hair, damp
from the shower, would turn into
a breakable tiara of icicles.

I looked at all the stunned
glittering in the trees, each limb
sheathed as if for a long keeping: as if
the heart keeps best, numbed and on ice.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.