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

Landmarks

Girl with the single braid falling down her back,
boy with the limp or a stone in his shoe—

Old man dressed in his only white suit
walking up the road with his cane—

In those days one could buy
bread at dawn from the corner store,

little yeasty fistfuls to carry
like hot stones in each hand, careful

to avoid the dogs that snarled
and pulled at their chains

in unkempt yards— And on Mount
Santo Tomas, the twin cupped discs

of radars that marked the edge of a world
beyond which it did not seem possible

to venture: only the hawks could view
the sea from that height, or the sun

as it slipped from our grasp,
disappearing the end of each day.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Tracks

This entry is part 26 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

You say you do not remember
the things we used to do
together— We counted the hundred
and some steps that led to the cathedral,
holding our breath from near vertigo
on descent. The boys that sold
lottery tickets loitered along the edge
of the overlook, tempting fate
at the same time that they sold dreams
cheap, if by the dozen. I was ashamed
one summer to wear the shoes
made to correct the uncanny
curvature of my back. And so I believed
you then when you said I should find
the filament in the center
of the spider’s web, roll it
between my thumb and forefinger,
swallow it like a pill. We circled
the neighborhood streets like strays
intent on finding the map to places
where wildness was still spoken,
a language not yet extinct.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Red hornbill earring

In a dog-eared journal from many years ago, I find
a pencil drawing and notes from a lecture given
by a cultural anthropologist:

red hornbill earring,
beautiful carved badge, sign
that the wearer has taken a human head.

So much of his life
was devoted to the detailed study
of this ritual among a certain tribe—

how the ritual began
when the fire-trees blossomed,
red bunting that bordered narrow

mountain trails with risk as prelude
to desire. My notes read: It is the practice
of Ilongot men to present a severed head

or other body part
to a prospective wife. I did not know
him then, nor his wife, though they came

to work among us in our campus
village, where we kept our own rituals
as arbitrary and elaborate as any other

brought under a scholar’s scrutiny.
What was it we heard? Fog-wrapped
ravines, his wife’s mis-step

in the treacherous dark—
Every anthropology houses
a poetry of grief. We all spend

lifetimes searching for meanings
that elude our grasp, whose starkness will shine
with a clarity we do not even need to give them.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Fear of a white planet.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Indelible

I wanted to write letters
on pieces of bark and burn them down to ash.

I wanted to scrape
the inside of each memory where it lies

closest to the membrane.
I wanted to send you a telegram in hieroglyphs

that the future is still inventing,
but whose encryption is locked

in a simple key: which is to say,
the mind tends to track shapes that may not bear

any likeness to their original outline.
Inky with light or cross hatched with shadow

is all that matters: whether the snow was falling
or if salt crystals etched the window glass.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

What could we know

This entry is part 25 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

of the hidden, that gleam
constellations away, without
any known name for it here?
And what could we know
of the answer that arrives
as faint echo, lighthouse
beam cutting through fog
in some millennium where we
might still after all be
mortal, shipwrecked, if not
for what love deposited
in these bones?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

From life:

which is to say, not
equivalent, but like:
life-like, that

verisimilitude
exacted from observing
closely the way we work
through the vagaries

of events. Notice
I do not say the way
things work. Nor do I
mention disaster

or tragedy, not even
success. Time is merely
time, eluding the master
index with clear tabs.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Molest

This entry is part 24 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

On the sheet, the child renders
a house with crayons: tilted roof,

fence, yard, the figures that make up
the family— The mother and father

are taking a nap. Or they are out.
Then a room— curtained over

with blue or black, disguised
by the steam from the iron

and the starch on the clothes—
where something happens for which

she has no words at the time: the uncle
wants to play doctor, to conduct

an examination— Neither did she
have words for doubt, suspicion,

the tingle in the parts that burned.
There are words whose meanings she’ll

mull over all her life: rupture
in her head, lesion on her tongue,

having come to their true disclosures.
When she says them now, she is like

the meter reader, gauging from month
to month the cost of what was used.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.