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

Arguments with destiny: 6

The lark is mad—
and the nightingale’s tongue
is shorn to silence it;

the tree whipping its hair
in the wind is no tree but a girl
frozen in her tracks, stunned

from a blow to the solar
plexus, disarmed by the sound
of the lock turning clock-

wise in the door, the whistle
of wind escaping from its cage.
Such flimsy power in the mouths

of the would-be gods; and the wreath
of their petty accusations, the spit
that shines and sours in the dark.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Blithe spirit.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Arguments with destiny: 5

“I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost…” ~ “Riches,” Gabriela Mistral

When you were sick for a long time,
the ceiling tilted like a throat
drunk on the molasses of slow
fevered dreams. Marooned

on an island of sheets, you
were brought water, ice cubes,
bowls of broth, fruit plucked
from the tree and speckled

with night rain. The sun swelled
somewhere, in a different sky.
Yours was the cocoon of frog
songs, old ceremony of rice

grains poured into shallow dishes
to divine the blood’s chemical
repercussions. When finally
they led you into the steam

of a bath, you broke through
the surface: sacrificial lattice
of eucalyptus leaves dissolving
in a paroxysm of long-held breath.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Arguments with destiny: 4

“O, to take what we love inside…” ~ Li-Young Lee

The day we looked for my mother
was the day she refused to be found.
And the week before that was a day
one of the women in their circle

walked into the surf as her husband
pleaded and threatened, brandishing
a gun— I was not there but I can see
the glint of their faces, the sharp

points of tears swallowed in the foam.
I don’t know what color the water was,
what it took, what it never gave back.
And so like a stunned general he hurried

down from his horse; in the middle of the day,
he brought a garment of unfamiliar remorse.
Please when we find her, he said:
Tell her. Tell her. You tell her.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Arguments with destiny: 3

“You whose name is aggressor and devourer.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz

You whose name is Eigengrau, intrinsic grey in perfect darkness,
intrinsic light made to wear a uniform of drab in the open-air—
When I heard you fumbling among the crates and boxes I hid
in sheets of newsprint, panicked at first I cowered

in my own darkness and muted my breath. When you took
me from myself I learned to adjust sight to the optic
edges, learned to gather pinpricks from among the softer
gradients. I don’t refute you, in the way one never

can refute the looming presence of that teacher,
the one who made you kneel on dry beans
on the dusty schoolroom floor, your punishment
for refusing to take to heart his lessons.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Arguments with destiny: 2

“…you, who forever elude me” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

You will deny it, but the same bird echoes
through us mornings and evenings; and in the sultry
afternoons when pigeons and stray dogs scratch
the untranslatable into the hard baked mud

of the square. I can name so many things
that come to have the shape they have
by virtue of sheer repetition. The heart builds
one ring upon another; and the peeled-back bark’s

already healing even as the white sap
spirals down a groove into the waiting tin.
To live in the eloquent gaps of contradiction
which spurn and enchant at every turn: how

is one to survive? A voice calls,
and the body turns: its learned habits
of obligation. The body twitches each night,
before dropping into the ravine of sleep.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Arguments with destiny: 1

“Everything goes into me.” ~ Tomaž Šalamun

Curse and blessing, blessing
and curse: to want everything,
deplore the wanting, then plunge
a whole hand into the bowl anyway;

to eat like the world was ending,
which you know it will in time
but just not yet, and to feel
ashamed that you have shown

the size of the hunger in your gut—
And the birds in the nest open their mouths
and cry, and something comes through the mist
to soothe them: Who is it then

that will succor and feed
the one that is sent, the one called to serve;
the one that lies prone at the base of the tree,
dizzy with the ache of the unknown?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Mortality.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Burn Marks

~ with a line from Rubén Darío

Just because I’ve had to wear the oily green
floating on the surface of the pond

does not mean there is in me
no bud of thought seeking to be

a rose, does not mean my heart has not
looked with longing upon the moon

or caved open to a rain of blows
from some god’s hands— At least

a few times in this life I’ve seen the clearly
knighted edge of a moment: one in which

the present leaped, ecstatic tinder, toward a future
reaching across the barrier with its flame.

 

In response to Via Negativa: A soft storm in the skull....

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Blackout

Visiting the poet’s shrine, I rubbed
a stick of graphite with my fingers
across a sheet of paper laid on stone—

To take away what: a letter? a vowel?
semblance of thin speech sent forward
across the void? Whatever it is

that transferred there is willful:
my doing, applied to a text that hardly
knows the compound altered by the years.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Thinned.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Shift

They ask her where she was born,
despite the team sweatshirt she wears
as she works quietly at the cutter
on the floor. At her feet, a litter of pieces
and the sift from contact of fiber with the blades.
Twice a month the machines need oiling: a smell
like old mushrooms lingering in the air.
Her bones? They are small and well suited
for the minute labors repeating like seconds
around the hour— Or so she is told.
She knows how to duck out the door at the sound
of the bell, how to disappear in a sea of faces
divided into shifts: resembling hers,
resembling no one really, she knows.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Hillbilly.