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

Poem with a line from Ilya Kaminsky

The darkness, a magician, finds quarters
behind our ears— every single time,

quick wave of a hand, twirl of fingers that brush
dangerously close to the face. Long past childhood,

of course now we know they were planted there.
But always, we act genuinely startled; we giggle

nervously, comb out our hair, pick out sudden twigs,
moss and bramble, dried curl of bark as if we’d slept

all night in a forest lair. And who’s to say
where the soul has lodged in between stations?

It rouses itself and treks out again in the cold
mornings, washes its dirt-streaked face in the stream.

It holds out a hand to thumb a ride as vehicle
after vehicle passes its dusty figure on the road.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Bohemian life.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Gilded

This entry is part 23 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

She rubbed ointment across the darkening patch on her ankle, feeling the itch beneath the burn.

*

Some miniatures take months, sometimes years, to complete. One must ponder the weight and shape of what is missing, before the outline can be imagined.

*

She wrote of receiving in the mail pots of aloe, pots of African violets— propagated by friends from original plants once tended by her son before he passed away.

*

It is astonishing, how anger and hurt behave— leave in them too long the impress of your fingers and they will adorn every space in the room.

*

Honey on the tongue, bitterness in the heart. Soon the grammar of venomous bees in each ear.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Not Less

This entry is part 22 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

No one is late: only present
to the need particular
to her own circumstances.

And each in his own time
forages for what is
already here—

hidden in plain view,
without restrictions,
though strewn among

the rocky surfaces.
No one is more worthy,
no one less beautiful.

All hunger
for this world goes
by the same name.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Elegy in Ideograms

Instead of anger, we said: we will find
old trails through mountains refusing passage.

*

Instead of sorrow, we said: even God’s tears
are too hot for the caldera our hearts.

*

Instead of hunger, we said: now you will feel
your large intestines consuming the small.

*

Instead of fear, we said: not even your hands
can cut off our greater desire for air.

*

Instead of perhaps, someday room at the table, we said: if
the yeast goes to work, everything should rise with the dough.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Process

I want to know: what keeps you
stirring up the liquid in the tray;

again and again, plunging your hand
to the shallow bottom to unsettle

sediment, just when the water
is so close to clear? Today began

in fog: not even the outlines of trees
emerged until the sun was past its prime.

In the end, however gradually,
everything delivers itself from need.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Instructions for the long march

You will not need all that clothing
lying in heaps on the shelves,
hanging like skins gathered in
a different season.

And you will have to do
certain tasks that used to be
fulfilled by others, or that you
only read about in manuals

for long-term care. But
in all things, you must learn
gentleness— which is a little
like but more than just

dimming the lights to soften
the glare, or reaching around
the body to unhook stays
that bind or support.

Give yourself to what will sustain
the most, what will boost the quality
of breath in the most interior room.
When everything without

grows fuller and more crowded with noise,
discard all unnecessary furniture. Watch
the landscape expand with what you
remember of water and light and air.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Making the bed

Lie in the bed you’ve made,
I was told: shorthand for all
that we supposedly could not

take back: the word or pledge
that others came to witness,
after which a cake was cut

with one beribboned knife,
and mouths were stuffed
to gagging with sugary

crumbs amid laughter
and drunken cheers.
Later, when the bed

was sheathed in anger
and hot tears, I tried
to figure out how virtue

lay in waiting for what
might not ever change.
Every morning I sought

to tuck the corners in
as tight as I was able—
By then I had daughters.

By then I could not
afford to wait for some
questionable deliverance.

 

In response to Via Negatia: Sailor's wife.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Harbor

This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2014

Do you not sometimes want to just leave
the city you’re in, to push off

in a raft you have made of your daybed—
white cotton sheets to the rising wind,

the rope of your dreams loosening
mortise and tenon joints from the four-

legged anchor that fixed your berth
all these years: one same returning

address, the one always at home to pick up
the pieces, return them to the frame

from which they’ve fallen or come loose,
she who’s asked to pay ransom after ransom

for those who left a long time ago,
not always knowing how much it costs—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Event horizon

For if the dust of everything, the particle
of every gesture and every moment

is always and already the very shimmer
and form of the here and now, then

the person you have always been
but think you are still trying to become

is right here trying to get your attention,
trying to turn you away from the asshole

who has just said something incredibly rude
or even cruel while standing next to you

in line, so that it causes you to forget
the sound of the music you carry inside,

it causes you to believe the falsehoods
inflicted by whoever brandishes the biggest

flame seething in the abyss of his un-
acknowledged fear or pain— But the past

is paradox, is both now and still
to happen; will never be fixed like stone

in burial ground. The scorch of summer
has opened its pores, incessant rains

have softened it for growing.
Not even the chill of coming winter

can alter the structure of what
the seed is/meant to be.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Sisyphean

This entry is part 21 of 27 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

Last week, seven bags that I raked
of what the wind, the dark, the late
hour at this time of year detached
from trees that ring the backyard—

Today our small plot of earth
once more is carpeted end to end:
pine straw and layers of their thick,
wet pelt. It seems impossible

to keep up now with all the ruined
wealth they shed, to put a stop
to this red and gold display of their
indifference, reflected still in every

window— And I know it will not matter,
but anyway I gather my anguish back in, drag
the implement’s teeth across the ground;
blink back my tears in the cold, bright light.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.