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

Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,

This entry is part 22 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

 

banded muscle that’s caused this hammering in my chest and ears and brain, of course like all the neighbors I’m a nervous wreck but thankful for your still apparently rapid reflexes. Having gone upstairs to brush my teeth and get ready for bed, at first I didn’t hear it clearly, the sudden pounding on the door at nearly midnight, then louder, the sounds of screaming— woman? man?— on the walk outside, followed by flashing lights and the voices of cops yelling Put your hands up! Put your hands up! Now it’s all over the late night news— Foot patrols leading big dogs to sniff around in the bushes and in the mews, even a helicopter buzzing overhead, lights sweeping in arcs like wipers across a dark windshield. Reports are mixed— Drug bust, car chase; one caught, one still on the loose; or all of them now in jail. Your wild agitation diminishes, but never really the fear; and the sorrow as well for a world where no one opens windows to let in the night air anymore.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 23 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

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Shirtwaist Elegy

There is an ache like a shield across the place
where my heart should be, fleshy like a fist
or callused like fingers and embroidered

with floss. Needles track a path around its contours,
their swish adjusting as they push and retract.
See the crown of the oak burning, brighter

than a furnace at the factory window. Hear
the treadle’s slap, the blouses spool paler
than spring blossoms and thin as linen,

from under the hands of girls. Whipstitch and chain,
darts that gather the billows in. The shirt I’m wearing
is made in Bangladesh, Turkey, or the Philippines,

where clotheslines crisscross sky: sleeves and bodices
flail in salt-laced wind— weft of signatures whose
facing edges I’ll button and wear against my skin.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 22 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape, with Night Sky Obscured by Street Lamps

Here where we crane our necks, walking home
where yellow lights flood the little streets
and alleys in measured increments, neither
can the trimmed points of cypresses figure

where the constellations lie. The hunter
seems merely an old bedtime story: its belt
and quiver and bow, its prey too small
from this distance to see. And that river

of stars dividing the greater distance
between time and prophecy I’m sure
is milky, its edges tinted lilac
or cool blue; and the vessels

that pour and pour yet never reach
the pinnacle of thirst. What becomes
of them when the dark unsettles, when
the lion opens its maw and the bird

flies, trembling, back toward the sun?

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 21 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Threshold

In the shelled cities, in the ghost towns,
among the buff-colored hulls of strafed

buildings, the dead congregate: brides
who never consummated their vows,

their bridegrooms in whose mouths sand
rained the lost hours before they

could even fill with sweets and dates.
And the wraiths of mothers who pined away,

not knowing which part of the desert
they should water with their tears;

which rock cradled the tongueless
or sightless remains of husband,

brother, son— Above the oil fields
and endless plains, the calculus

continues, one end of the hourglass
swinging over to the other;

and under night’s dark tent, stars reel:
so many hornets released from the nest.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 20 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Lyric for Waking

Walk, said the master in that miracle of waking.
See. Or hear. In this labyrinth of partitions,
the merely unmiraculous voices clatter against each
other every morning. Theirs is the sound of copper,
of coins and cups with their sleeves of corrugated
cardboard. It is always warmer out than in. Or
in than out. On the street corner, where the kids
from the Governor’s School for the Arts are waiting
for the bus, one girl says to another, “Stimulants.
I just take stimulants.” A thread of green unravels
from the edge of my sweater. If I pulled it, wound it
into a ball, how far would it take me out of the cave?
The voices are also breathing. A warm wind blows
over the tops of trees in the city, flutters
like long ribbons of gauze— imagine them peeling
off our faces, startling like fish from the depths.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 19 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

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Letter to S, with Fading Sunlight

The pebbly look of clouds at dusk, as though washed
limpid by sky clear as water.

And yes it’s hard for me to pass grocery store shelves
bedecked with sale signs, the sidewalk tables

at the corner cafe where tiny jugs for cream
and lidded bowls for sugar gleam whitely—

and not think of you wondering where next
month’s sustenance is coming from.

You say you take a cup of coffee in the morning,
bread, an egg sometimes. What else?

Someone points out the wild rose bushes
next to the broken-down wall, how they are

choked with ruffled blossoms—
everything sunlit, struck, blazoned

as the air above fills with indigo,
even as the light is dying.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 18 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Composition

Weekends, on the second floor of an old building at the end of the girls’ high school, the art teacher set wooden eggs and cylinders on a table by the window. Outside, spicy smells of wood-smoke: moldering leaves and dead twigs the gardeners raked into piles under the guava trees and burned. Think of light as a thin finger of ochre you halo around a shape, he said. Think of the angle as it hits the roof. Camouflaged in the trees, the shadow of a bird that looks upon the scene and sees the worm’s dark squiggle vanish into the dirt. And there are always ruins— the remnants of a bell tower in the foreground, the dark sweep of a volcano’s skirts steepling away in the distance; or something Grecian, cool skins of marble chipped in the places where they might have spoken or gestured or sung of flight— veined lip, suspended arm, knobs beneath the shoulder blades where wings were broken off. And always, stones strewn like jewels in the grass.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 17 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Aerogramme

This entry is part 21 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

 

At first light, the mother with the bones grown brittle as a sparrow’s gets up to wash her face in the ancient sink. The ceilings are still damp from the last hurricane when the roof leaked in more places than she had pails for. On the wall, faint prints of mold shaped like whorls of ears— they listen as she prays aloud or talks to her husband who left this world more than a decade ago. Far away, farther than the sights of a bird perched on some craggy roost, I follow her every move in the falling-down house: my lips touching the rim of her coffee cup, my fingers opening and closing on the shapes of bread and cheese and fruit I want to heap upon her plate; the rings of silver and gold and pearl I want to slide back, lovingly, upon those thin, arthritic fingers which once sewed every seam of my world neatly into place.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear errant winds at dusk,

This entry is part 20 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

 

what do your long fingers
want to trace? Downtown,
at the intersection, a woman
walks with her marine in a dress
of gathered green. Its silk
petals flutter, and she
is an artichoke whose heart
shelters under overlapping
eaves, listening to the sounds
of the orchestra tuning up,
feathering; cradling the throats
of wood or brass for warmth;
and in the end, putting away
notated sheets, packing up
or dismantling instruments.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

When does the hunger abate;

This entry is part 19 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

 

and in the woods, the downward flight of leaves, when does that cease? Even in dreams we move from window to window, waiting for morning, for the light-tipped crowbar to break the seal. We’ve eaten the bread, we’ve spooned the soup, we’ve burrowed into the bedclothes stripped of all but last night’s crumpled wings. Oh tender moths brushing against our sleep, even the gravel on the walk has multiplied. Harder than rain, I’ve prayed to the wish-granting gods though you see my lips forming only words like yolk or honey or dust, coin or sparrow or coal.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.