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

Brief Panorama, with Flowering

The root pushes up green shoots.

In the lot at the end of the street, visible bands of magenta.

First the crepe myrtles, then the pale tree lilacs, then magnolias.

We exclaim at their suddenness, their exponential amends for absence.

I want just for the moment to think only of this—

Something like profusion, something like a surplus, please not soon taken away—

Not the effort it cost, not the blind tunneling through softening loam.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Have a nice day.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Interruptions of the actual

This entry is part 7 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

In which finally the warm cast of sunlight pierces the skin around the heart.

In which we discuss how many cups of water are typically poured for one bath.

In which I try to explain how history is never absent; or how I am still learning not to flinch every time someone says a name which is my name yet not my name.

In which we are called to the jury window but cannot reveal to the person sitting next to us what has just now come over us with sadness.

In which the child walking with his mother down the sidewalk runs to a clump of blooms and excitedly chants yel-low yel-low.

In which the animal behind the wire fence comes up to take the cube of sugar and I want to ask of it my fortune, my not-yet-spent.

In which I measure the space between my thighs and wonder at the hinges in accommodation.

In which, arriving home late afternoons, somewhere in the steps taken between laundry machine and sink and pantry, the body resigns its dreams of rest.

In which I arrive at the conclusion that the word Mother is not a factory or threshing floor, not vessel or raft, not well, not cavity, but something more: I have no name for what is infinitely and always open to the elements.

In which I smooth the sheet and affix my signature.

In which I dust the charred heads of my wooden gods and line them up by the sill, because whatever crouches in so little space must crave any form of expanse.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Sums

The tree in the garden
has not yet received news of spring—
stubs of limbs and branches, remainders
of polynomial division.

*

In the living room,
a small pink light radiates.
I place a cube of ice
in the orchid tray.

*

The cold that returns
at night reminds us:
all the work we do
is always here.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Abstract.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Song for Steadfastness

Every Monday the sweet
bean curd vendor comes down the street.
No one would want to rise again
if not for his visit.

How long will he keep us
faithful to the days?
The city rains down coins
of bitter dust.

We cover our bowls
with our hands,
coming and going
from dawn to dusk.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Raw.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Codex

The agent called and asked me if I had a preference. I was asked to turn the knob one way for weather and another way for the time of year. At the end of the interview period I returned the cardboard box containing flash cards and brochures, only keeping back the ones that most audibly vibrated in my dreams. The first showed a stone chapel at the end of the world. The second had a fire pit whose flames were made of curling wind. The third held the bones of tiny fish and birds; they snapped open like umbrellas then caught on the edges of the sky when I released them to the air.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Runic

This entry is part 5 of 19 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

Some days I am tired of talk of struggle.
Of the effort it takes, on top of the struggle itself.

Is it really harder to choose, rather, to talk about the minute
clarities etched in the space just between and around my hands?

Long ago, a woman turned my hand over in hers and looked
at the lines etched on the side of my palm.

With a fingernail she traced the life-line
and its many shallow branches down the middle.

Time is a river, we say. Or time is a trail that leads
to that one faraway passage shining like a light in the hills.

And here I will touch the beautiful
splintering wood on the surface of an old table.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.