Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 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

Return

Not the trees, not the river that cut
through mud-bloated mountains—

Not the deer that once heralded the cold,
sweet waters with their grazing—

Not the gods that sat, soot-
blackened, in their stone circles—

None of these greeted us at our approach:
only the choked houses cloaked in rain.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Hive

In room after room we found bags of clothing
that she could not bear to part with.

They looked like giant cocoons
where wings of all colors lay trapped, unmoving.

Arranged on the baluster: a row of perfectly positioned
umbrellas, their silks twirled up and fastened.

The red-framed windows held hundreds of seeds
of rain— each one, precursor to the next.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Hourglass.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Bone Song

After all flesh is flensed,
the shape of the fish

is leaf, or the hull of a boat—
Flattened and dried

to the hue of balsa, whole
schools swim in waterless air.

In the dried fish market,
it’s hard to disregard

the certainty of what
they know: smell and taste

of sun-dried putrefaction,
gifts of salt and leathered skin

the body wants to hold on to
for as long as it possibly can.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Diagnosis.