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

Lessons in complexity

This entry is part 18 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

If the character had told the hungry children
they must earn their keep by begging in the streets,

if she had sold them surreptitiously
to the recruiter who wanted to know if they

were virgins; if the trail of bread or pebbles
shining in the moonlight was replaced

by coils of concertina wire, and the house
of sugar dreams boiled down into a soup

of rubber sap and insect wings— There’d be
no chance to buy time with a chicken bone

held up between the slats of a cage. Only the fire
would be a constant, a raging eager to be fed.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The soul feels small, looking up

at the spires of the old cathedral—

The world is a wheel and the trees
form a ring of spokes; when it turns,

the edge of the sky catches fire
and the soul wants a hand to hold

in such a flurry of dizzying purple
and gold. Still shy as when first

it ventured abroad, there it stands
tongue-tied in a roomful of people,

easily overlooked in the streets
with their theatre of noise.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Border studies

Eat, says the matriarch. Have you eaten?
say the elders in lieu of hello. It takes years
before you understand: each grain under the tongue,
each mouthful of rice wine protects— Since your breath
has warmed the pocked bowl of the spoon, the goats
will take salt from your hands. Clotheslines sag
with the weight of damp coats and ghost hands.
You know when the sky turns milky, when the house
fills with the sound of mandibles clicking. Eat,
they tell you again. Our troubles are nothing.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Surfeit.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The Momentary

This entry is part 17 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

Pressed into a corner, she could not decline.
At the moment of greatest vulnerability,

was there another more blameworthy than herself?
For instance, the parent that had run to the store.

The emptiness of spare rooms, inhabited only
by furniture. That she liked pockets, hiding

away in a corner with a board book in hand?
How was she to know the welcome from

the unwelcome advance? Memory, such
an unreliable witness. And yet

every thin ferrule of grass hides a blade
springing up in the after-passage.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Rogue Theatre

Come and see— one night only, all
the time: various forms of subtle
humiliation, scintillating acts.
Rolling with the punches, still
pretending, getting by and making
do. Buy a ticket, many tickets,
while your pocket throws every
caution to the winds. The sun
passes overhead, leaves its gash
across the furrows. Fish retreat
into the murky depths. Hear
the sad riff from harmonicas,
see men with familiar faces
touch fingertips to hat-brims
before jumping off the train.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Cold comfort.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The long-standing

Green marbled love
of the world, watery blue

promise of eventual solvency,
you went with me everywhere

before I even detected slight
syncopations in the blood,

before the soft spot in the curve
of beaten silver began to harden,

taking one shape as it tightened
its grip on my arm. I almost

did not listen: I clung
like a stubborn idea

to the heaving body
of the horse which rose

out of the river and mist
to bear me through

to the other side— And still
I don’t recognize this world

completely, but I give it permission:
I let the marsh birds and mosquitoes

take apart my name, I let the gnats
draw small haloes around my ankles.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ambition

Who was it said make
the bed you’ve lain in, eat
the rice you’ve cooked, turn
the flushed cheek to the other
side? I want to make
that bed in a field, eat
asterisks some careless hand
tipped out of a sooty pot,
then turn my cheek to the pillow,
allied with wayward dreams.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Reaction.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Eidos

Who ate my hunger and in eating
filled it? And who drank my punishing
thirst, then called up to air my mutest
songs? I did not know you then except
as the ache that ticked at my wrists,
as light that burned long after I
closed my lids. Long-fingered,
your shadow returns; and with one
move, locked gates surrender.

 

In response to Via Negativa: The Other (El Otro) ....