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

Postcard: Elephant Breeding Show, Thailand

“…That Beloved has gone completely Wild— He has poured Himself into me!” ~ Hafiz

From four months of travel in southeast Asia
with her boyfriend, one of my daughters
has brought back beads and woven scarves;

books, a granary god hewn from a small block
of darkened wood; and a few postcards from Thailand—
One shows gold-filigreed Wat Phra Singh temple

in Chiang Mai, ancient capital of the northern kingdom,
where they’d gone to see thousands of glowing lanterns
bobbing like celestial jellyfish in the sky during Loi

Krathong; the second, two little boys in saffron robes
adorning a buddha’s image with flower garlands; and last,
two elephants in an elephant breeding show, their rippling

flanks painted with scarlet, gold, and green scrolls,
red-pantalooned handler crouched underneath the canvas tent
formed by the female’s outspread body, another handler

holding her lowered head… I’ve read somewhere
that the elephant is among only six or seven
animals the world over, holding the distinction

of having the largest genitals (surprisingly,
the barnacle tops the list, with penis length
the equivalent of 240 feet in human measurement).

The postcard has no other caption or explanation,
no notes, no narrative, not even names for the two
at the center of this larger-than-life display

of heated encounter. I wonder about the sounds
they make, the length of his and her arousal, the smell
and quickness of release, and whether or not they

mind the ring of voyeurs gathered around:
snapping Instagrams as the slick grey muscle
stiffens and thrusts, recording videos to upload

on YouTube even before they’ve returned
to their hotels— Our youngest girl, pre-teen,
budding feminist schooled in cell division

and meiosis, thinks this picture is practically rape
(three males— elephant, two native handlers, who knows
how many spectators), and depicts the female’s abuse.

She cannot wrap her mind around this evidence
there are apparently carnivals built around the fact
of large animal coitus; but sees, intuitively,

the connection to shows like “The Bachelor”…
As for me, it is the chalked scrolls of heraldic
gold and red that fix my eye: how the female’s,

in the picture, hold their color and bold shape, while
the male’s are already a muddy run of dirty green
where the forefeet rasp across her rendered back.

 

In response to thus: come and drink your fill.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Episode

This entry is part 25 of 29 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2012-13

 

He wrote of his commute home from the city on Valentine’s day— In the train station, men and women all rushing to dinner, to the movies, to that rendezvouz with a lover— Rushing unmindful into heartbreak, heartache, all the buds of pleasure or anticipation quivering like tiny asterisks of Gypsophila paniculata and their not-quite shadows against pale grey walls, moving filigree of arms looped around massed bouquets of flowers— Ruffled lilies, darkly gleaming roses, anthuriums raising turgid centers like batons— And there on the station platform, a young man fallen forward on his belly, in the throes of a seizure— Torso stiff, arms and legs flailing, throat constricting, mouth foaming, eyes rolled back as if in rapture— Seizing and seizing, while the faces of that horde of strangers and lovers opened in confused speech and hands wildly gestured– And all the beautiful flowers wrapped in cellophane and ribbons, those astonishing, jeweled colors, trembling as if in sympathy— And as the medics came and lifted, the train doors closing and opening, closing and opening, and the people passing in and out of the vestibule again—

~ With thanks to Wilfredo Pascual

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Mouth Stories

This entry is part 24 of 29 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2012-13

 

She was but the daughter of a farmer who owned a small
tract of land, a hat with a brim, one good white suit—

And he was the son of a man he knew only by name and the long
stub of ash before it fell from the cigarette into the tray—

And she on the other hand was a child when her mother expired
in that unfortunate flowering of war, when a soldier ran

a bayonet through her brother’s heart— There in the field,
that wound pried open in the shape of a gaping mouth—

Even now, they recount how long lines of men walked
south and farther south in the heat— For days

furtive foraging in paddies for snails and frogs,
for draughts of water thickened with mud— For days

their hands, roped and stacked behind their heads—
Pliable like leaves and tender, the shoots

you couldn’t guess you could mash with your teeth
and hold like a shield against the roof of your mouth.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Invitation to the mouth.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Outlast

“I hear the horses of desire
go right to the surgeon….” ~ D. Bonta

If you want to buy a mat from the women weavers of the native Higaonon tribe, this is what you need to know: they don’t do PayPal, e-Bay, Craig’s List; they don’t do debit or credit cards. It may take two to three months to receive your order, depending on a number of factors, including whether or not there have been hurricanes or floods— which may have affected the availability of buri, pandan, tikog, or seagrass fronds. The leaves need to be gathered, cleaned, bundled; and in some cases stripped of thorns. Then they are sun-dried or air dried, made pliable with rhythmic beating, rolled then shredded into widths for weaving. Each weaver will sit on her haunches many hours in the sun, in the shade, in her house, adding the colors of the rooster’s feathers or an embroidered skirt, the salt-and-toffee smells of well-aged leaves. Her mother taught her this, or her grandmother, and the great-grandmother before that. There is no book of patterns, only the ripple of water, of wind, of rough scythes cutting through sparse grain. You will need to find a trusted courier to bring you the finished mat, and bring them the cash you will pay. You will not find this at Ikea or Exotic Home. Each piece is heirloom quality, each pattern never to be repeated. Which reminds me of how, the other night at dinner, I listened to our host’s friend tell the story of how at forty, she did not own a piece of silver or crystal, unlike other wives whose mothers handed down their prized sets; but in ten years, she had bought close to seven hundred pieces in all, some from Scotland, for a ridiculous amount of money: two or three patterns, flutes, water glasses, wine glasses, sherry glasses… And do you know, she said, waving her teaspoon in the air, that if you resold one of these today, it would fetch you only three dollars? She shook her head: It isn’t the same world anymore.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Self-medication.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Inheritance

Half of each of you makes two. Makes one
of each. Makes two of you and two of me,
at least. Is that not true? And good?
Is more the greater part of less?
And what of less when less is portioned
to only one of two? Who thrives,
who lives, who toils in shadow? Who
lifts her hem? Who pulls the breast
out of its pouch? Whose ear
receives the furtive breath?
Whose hand in moonlight pulls
toward the silver of the bark?
Only one. Or both. Of you.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Impromptu

“…I played a while on my lute
and could not kill anything.” ~ D. Bonta

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, reads the passage engraved upon a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross.

*

Long past midnight, the phone rings and I hear it as if from far away; but think it must be a dream so I don’t get up to answer. Sometime at midday, I remember to look at the list of missed calls. There is a voice mail message from my mother, but when I play it all I can hear are strange voices that sound like they’re coming from a noontime TV variety show called Eat Bulaga. A woman has just won the prize in a raffle; there’s thunderous clapping, the unctuous voice of the TV host saying how happy he is at this good fortune. My mother says she says she didn’t call, though she’d been thinking of me, missing me and her granddaughters; there is a two- or three- second delay, then she’s crying from the pain of having to live all alone at her age.

*

It’s said that even as a baby, Chopin was moved to tears by his mother’s singing.

His sister Ludwika cried after crossing the border back into Poland, when the woman who had helped to smuggle her brother’s heart back into the country of his birth, handed it to her in a glass jar tied up in a cloth bag and hidden under layers of her petticoats.

*

Recently I read a story about a woman who held her old heart in her hands after a successful surgical transplant: the photo showed her cradling what looked like papier mache, like folds of stiff, marble-colored parchment; or like a large shell washed up on the beach. Its curves reminded me of the outer lobes of the ear, which must have some bearing on why we still refer to phone handsets as receivers, even though most of the new technology has done away with all those curves.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Hanging jack.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Paired

Like them I follow the current, arch
into the white curve of questions; regard
my unsleeved arms, trying to remember
what it is that feels like it is missing,
what’s necessary. And in the evenings,
as lights go on in houses by the river,
their bent heads outlined in sudden flame
are beacons on dark-blue water—
So go the myths of all great faithfulness.
But isn’t it true the rule exists where instinct
curbs most keenly toward what it fears?
Isn’t it true that the clasp of the metal ring
and the twitch of the bridle mean the heart
is fickle, that the animal could one day drift
off into the wood to die or disappear?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Nursery rhyme.