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

Elegy, even after 22 years

This entry is part 35 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

My father, we did not know then it would be the last day of your life. But you struggled into your slippers and your bathrobe the warm, dusky-gold of corn; and you came and stood in the doorway, holding on to the wooden frame for ballast. How long did you stand there, more wispy than a plume of smoke, simply gazing over the rest of us huddled on two beds? We’d pushed them together, exhausted from going days without sleep through the aftershocks that rocked the city. The upright piano had moved to the far end of the living room. The china cabinet sounded crystal chimes as if from afar, but nearer than the drone of rescue helicopters fracturing the dark. No one dared to light candles for fear of setting the house on fire. No one dared to unfasten their shoes. I’ve written this over and over, composing and revising, revising and composing, trying to return to that elusive fold of time, those last few hours before your body stiffened and your eyes turned silver-grey, the color of a clear but frozen lake. Even as nurses tried to revive you where you lay on a pallet in the hospital wing, your spirit had started its journey. Out of that valley it rose, rising above earthquake ruins, rising higher than the limestone rocks; rising, still, as seasons changed and pools of sleeping fish warmed back to life.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

If not with me

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither…” ~ Job 1:21 (KJV)

Would you go? Would you go in my place? e-mailed a friend, having paid in advance months ago for a twelve-day trip she would not be able to take. Down the Rhine, from Bamberg, Wurzburg, Freudenberg, down to Koblenz and Cologne, finishing with three days in Amsterdam. I would have, but for various reasons couldn’t, can’t. So I said no. Oh don’t get me wrong— who wouldn’t leap at the chance? Everything paid for: all-inclusive of meals, wine and beverages— anytime, anywhere; the land excursions, the entrance fees to museums and castles, barring other side trips outside the itinerary once the ship docks at ports of call; cashless on the boat, no tipping allowed, gratuities pre-calculated into the cost. Do not inquire too closely into my reasons. O magnum mysterium. Only know that I find it difficult to revel in joy alone. Will you reconsider? she asked. There will be 3 balls: the welcome, the Captain’s farewell, the Christmas dinner ball; live music, open seating, a personal valet on the liner through the entire trip. Truly, I thanked her; and promised, perhaps someday.

 

In response to the cassandra pages: two world premieres.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Inflorescence

“Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof,
That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house thereof?”

~ Job 38: 19-20

 

We sit and hug our knees, watching as children come to the center of the square, where volunteers have set up fires and big iron cauldrons. Some have brought buckets, and some have brought styrofoam bowls; and some have brought tin plates or the plastic cover of a margarine tub. Their faces are smeared with soot, with tears, with snot. They haven’t eaten for days. They haven’t washed. Soon there isn’t enough for their hunger. We wonder, will there ever be enough again? The long-handled ladles scrape the last burnt layers from the bottom of the pot. A few grains of brown rice, onions, lentils in the mouth. Behind them, the setting sun casts shadows in hives of stucco and plaster. Hollow stairwells, honeycombs of walls where bedrooms and kitchens used to be. Should I mouth the old prayers, should I repeat a phrase of comfort to my neighbor huddled beside me, it isn’t from claiming to know, Lord, what these designs can mean. I am smaller than a cipher on a flimsy page. In the darkness, every heart still beating buries itself like a mine waiting to explode, the way the dark amber flesh of a date swells and breaks open, no longer able to contain either its ripeness or the sugars that have hardened to stone.

 

In response to small stone (177).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

November

This entry is part 34 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

And what is to be visceral, if not to lead with the deeper mind of the body’s insides? The gut is often wiser than the radio which sits in its alcove in the attic (keenly wired to the world and its signals but only for as long as its battery acids have been replenished). So cold today… Seen from the high oriel window that juts out of brick: a skein of dark glyphs over gray-draped fields, the quarrelsome racket of crows. I’ve learned not to believe everything that purports to bring forward an accounting. In our ledger of days, the hills might be pages crammed with previous scripts— And yet, even the lopped-up limbs of dead trees twitch back to life in the fire.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

…there is no end to the kindness of this world

For the worm in the breast is still, though the slug
beneath the stone may have shredded the leaf to lace—

For the square of grass has brightened gradually
in the sun, and the smell of burnt toast and coffee

mingles with the morning air— For the jellyfish
stabbed more than fifty times in its petri dish

has miraculously come back to life,
for the aging scientist to feed by hand—

For paper lanterns have lifted into the sky,
tiny fires ablaze in their bellies, allowing a sea

of faces to look straight up into the dark— For our
tired feet and fumbling fingers, uncertain hearts,

our clumsy, uncombed foliage: the only flags we know
to hoist with the halyard each anointed day.

 

In response to thus: no end to the kindness of this world.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

If only the wind now dresses the trees

This entry is part 32 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

in leaves, it’s time to clap two
pieces of wood together.

Keep an eye on the fire, raising both
hands over your head; turn one knee out
while resting the sole of the foot

on the inside of the calf. Imagine
what it takes to stay breathing like that,
how to store up heat for a whole season.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Pavor Nocturnus

This entry is part 31 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

All night, he said, I’d thrashed and snarled
thick bits of indecipherable language through
clenched teeth; and even after he’d shifted
my unconscious, evidently dreaming body
into another position, whatever its source
would start me up again— In the morning,
limbs aching as if from deep muscle strain,
I tell him I’m still trying to remember,
reluctant to name the same old ghosts
that have come here again to haunt me—
First, the boy my mother hired from down
the street to cut the grass and scrub
the floors, and how he slit gladiolus stems
and yellow snapdragon throats in the garden
from boredom, before turning to me to say
he’d show me how to play doctor; then,
not long after, the uncle whose unexpected
fingers broke into my afternoon naps—
How could you remember something like this,
they said to me years later, implying lies,
invention, refusing to believe a three-
year-old could come to such swift understanding
of how something could untether from the body
suspended within a bathroom’s cold white tile,
climb up the wire dangling the lone light bulb,
out the window, past the twisting trees
to where the thin, high notes of some
small bird beat through the air—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Canción sin fin

This entry is part 30 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

“Paciencia y barajar.” (Patience and shuffle the cards.)
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote

 

Open certain books, and windmills
become giants, most certainly arrived
to take over or worse, defile the earth.
Since no one else apparently sees

the impending danger, you have to be the one
to don your suit of armor, fix the brass
washbasin on your head, hoist the pennant
of your dirty dishrag— Turn the ignition

of your trusty, pre-owned chariot and ride
through fields of goldenrod drying in late
winter light, as birds scatter cryptic
messages in the air. And who’s to say

this isn’t the waking world, after all?
The stakes remain the same: beneath
its newfangled disguises, love; honor,
in a world where it grows harder

to tell the nobleman from the thief.
The story that knighted you, the song
you were given, that you have
to keep trying to sing.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.