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

Urgency

This entry is part 17 of 18 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2013

 

What is meant these days when critics and reviewers say this or that poet’s work has the flavor of urgency? Do they mean the urgency of the package that must be delivered not because of its contents, but because the sender has paid the more expensive rate? Do they mean speed: to beat the next two cars to the mall exit after hours? What do they mean when they praise the killer line and the break: do they drop a kick turn sharper than the boy skateboarding in the empty parking lot? Do they mean the sudden singed smell and the hank of hair that comes away in the grips of a hot iron as the teen makes her YouTube beauty tutorial? Even this late in the century, there are fields that hum at the edges from their proximity to barbed wire or an electric fence. Where can one walk where there aren’t bones buried underfoot? A man I went to school with was abducted three years ago as he waited in the early hours for a bus to take him into town. What the stones would say if they had tongues. How the smallest animals know when the merest shadow has crossed the yard.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

River of discontent, river of longing,

river that plucks with the wind at my sleeve

or the hem of my dress for attention—
I love my solitude but I love the light

that bounces back the syllables of your name
and woos me like a lover: then you are chime

on the blade’s metal edge, red thread
running through a vest, that something else

wanting to glint like a brooch or a star
against the breast of an ordinary life.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Present.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Closing Costs

Forgive me for wanting
a plot of land, a bit of porch
from which house spiders might drape
sheer curtains—

Forgive me for transporting
my nostalgia for the stones
of my native land into these
applications for financing—

Forgive me for insisting
on some semblance of choice
between Model A and Model B,
for inquiring into

the neighborhood’s history—
for checking how floorboards
cross the grain of wood,
how doors open,

where the heart
of the house might rest.
Among my kind, abode is sacred,
both land and domicile first

amortized by sacrifice: seeds
planted by the doorstep, blood-
smeared coins sunk in the soil
beneath the stone foundations.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Dirt Farmer.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Borderline

For passage into a foreign country,
a sheaf of stamped documents:
does the photo match the face
pressed into the cellophane window,
does the name in the book match
the one answered to?

The pigeons in the square
squabble over crumbs in their
domestic tongue. The children
want to wade in the fountain.
The mothers and fathers say no,
no, that isn’t allowed.

Recognition is a luxury few
can truly claim— Most of us
walk around from room to room,
in circles, repeat the daily
rituals of arrival and departure
without really going anywhere.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Martial Artist.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

“The bird never flew on the one wing, you know*—“

And the salt never spared an inch
of the slug crawling across its glittering trail—

But the bird with the fractured wing still
troubles the air in her dreams,

and bound sheaves in the autumn field
send up gold sparks of their burning.

So the fire in the throat
is a river’s coursing,

and the moon’s blue tint
is epistle to the harvest blade.

Come closer then as if to drink,
as if to drown, as if to kiss

every surface mirrored,
throbbing, doubled in the glass.

* R.T. Smith recounts in a Richmond Times Dispatch article on Seamus Heaney: “I’ll never forget him saying, after a quick drink in a Sligo pub, “You’ll have another, so.” When I objected that I shouldn’t, as I was driving, he gave me that great joyous smile and said, ‘The bird never flew on the one wing, you know.’”

 

In response to small stone (256).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

If the future is a bird headed for a summit too far away to tell:

This entry is part 16 of 18 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2013

 

If for every word I lay down, someone else throws two soda pop tops up in the air where they glisten, false metal hard in the sun; and the crowd says oooh.

If somewhere a hand snaps a cloth around the mouth, tightens a blindfold, tucks the glistening, form-fitting spandex around the body, checks the buckles of its expensive shoes.

If the moth trembles in the eaves, it is for every story lived that someone else appropriates: reconstitutes with plastic, fiberfill; turns into amuse-bouches.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The wren in the lilac cycles through its songs at breakneck speed—

This entry is part 15 of 18 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2013

 

And why not sing? And why not burn a track
from the tinder of the branch to the furnace of noon?

The maw of that which will devour us all,
that gapes beyond apartments and old strip malls;
the rusted iron gates over which the neighbor’s ivy creeps,

unpeopled mansions built
on mountaintops exposed, tracts of sand
over which armies of boots grind children’s bones

to dust— And why not empty
all the vessels of the throat,
the glittering receptacles of blood;

and why not break
the hundred glasses in the room
with the sharpest facets of that joy,

that long-lost twin of sorrow?
Hurry through one more refrain, as if it were
the thread in the labyrinth that could save you.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

In the Ablative

This entry is part 14 of 18 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2013

 

With care,
with enough sunlight,
with the quiet that transcends
movement when a door hinge cracks like an eggshell—

In the summer,
in the first shallow drifts of autumn,
in the terrible seasons of rotting fruit
when we rush to embalm their sugar in pastry—

Where the assassin bug skates lightly,
where the deer have gone into the thorn,
where the wildness loves what’s
hidden, without shame—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Anamnesis

This entry is part 13 of 18 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2013

 

Axis of smells gathered in the knot of a compass, windmill churning in the absence of wind: if I say panaginip, it means dream split open. It means heat causing a mirage of tender feelings, or rain falling in sixteen hour shifts. So much moisture is good for the soil; and such weather is perfect for a meal of beans. If the insects have had their supper, why are they lined up at the sill? On the continents of yes and no and maybe, there are thresholds that cannot be crossed, and there are those that blur beyond recognition.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Fata Morgana

What is the name of that goddess in the print, her arms full of instruments for music and torture, her mouth beautiful like a flower or the tip of a spear, her red-painted feet flashing across hot coals and a circle of fire? I am not cunning like that, I am not fierce or graceful, and it’s become harder to read more than one book at once. Do you remember when I tried to cook two things at the same time on the two hot plates of the stove? One saucepan was burned so badly we had to throw it away. And as I stood in the yard before I dropped the piece of disfigured metal with its melted plastic handle into the trash, I remembered the way my father looked just hours after his death, laid out on a bed for want of a coffin, arms folded on his chest in the attitude of peaceful sleeping. His skin had not cooled yet, his cheeks had not taken on the hue of those who’ve started walking away from this place and will no longer look at the spill of late flowering blooms by the fence. With my two arms I hugged myself the way another would. With my two hands I gathered up and tied my hair, I walked back to my house of appetites, my house of things, my life of many parts waiting to be wound and folded, mended, counted, found.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Potent Combination.