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

Desiring Brightness

She touched my jacket admiringly and said we had the same taste,
except she favored black and white, not so much brightness.

I on the other hand was tired of all the overcast shades
in the closet, wanted a shot of lime and vodka, its brightness.

Oh did I say vodka? I meant of course something crisp and light,
not overbearing; something not neon or cloying in its brightness.

The peach and lemony light of summer has swirled away too quickly.
And no one dries their laundry on the line anymore, for brightness.

One-touch and power settings, then time, then start. Then a circuit
shorting, equals a dead microwave. But there’s a stove! Brightness!

Above the clatter of knives and chafing dishes, he said: So when
are you taking me out? That little swell: fishing for brightness.

I exited the hall as the lights were dimmed, and drove toward the water.
The water was all shades of lilac; the street lamps vied for brightness.

 

In response to small stone (162).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Poetas

Everyone we listened to had such a gift: if not lightness of tongue, then the language of expansiveness so that we sat, rapt, transfixed in our chairs or as if loosed into the suddenly bright highway of sky beyond the library windows, reeling among the birds that must have said among themselves, What drunken fool just hit me? And what of that gift, that beat of song, restless tattoo that lives beneath the ribcage, wheezing and pleating like a bandoneón in the hands of an itinerant musician? I heard it once and then nothing was the same. Light became the space between the saying of a word and the shape that its sound made, flying in the cave of the throat; became a rain-soaked umbrella, became each quickly vaporizing bead begging to be counted, threaded, tasted, forgiven, fed.

 

In response to cold mountain (63).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Essential

“…rare, singular, unattainable, but:
here” ~ seon joon

Tonight, after the reading,
someone asked the poet
in the red shirt and black
motorcycle boots which writers
had influenced her the most—
and she replied by recalling
how she had gone to school
during a time when everyone
was lionizing all these great
women poets who had killed
themselves: Plath of course;
and Sexton (who was her teacher).
Then one day a substitute came
and turned on this light—
and she realized one could be
a good poet, even a good,
angry, feminist poet,
and still love life.

 

In response to cold mountain (61).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Own

This entry is part 4 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

All this beautiful, heavy hardwood furniture—
the slab of polished mahogany that serves
as coffee table, the long-leaved dining table
and its matching credenza from Spain, the grand
piano in the living room that we are thrilled
to play Bach, Gershwin, “Chopsticks,” or
Sondheim on— belongs to our landlady.
To rent her digs, the deal was that we had to live
with all her stuff. We looked around at what
we owned— six folding bookshelves, three
computer desks, a couch, a few lamps picked up
at Service Merchandise or Target, a microwave and
microwave cart, our daughter’s sleeping pallet;
and many, many bankers’ boxes filled with books—
and said something like Easy come… or perhaps
We can’t take it with us when we go. And one
of the friends who took over our possessions quoted
from song or scripture that part about our cares
being worth more than those of white-throated sparrows
singing in the field, all the while assessing
the quality of a set of china on which he had designs.
But it’s ok, really— We look after the place as if
it were our own, and thank our lucky stars for so many
windows— the upstairs ones are great for reading
our books or writing late, by late summer light. We pay
utility bills when they are due, change the batteries
in the smoke detectors, take the lint out of the dryer
screen. We vacuum and mop beneath the beds and chairs,
in hard to reach corners where hair and dust balls
consolidate the interest they will secure in final lien.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

We woke and the world was colder,

This entry is part 3 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

We woke and the world was colder,
the season progressing steadily

toward winter— the line of trees
more shorn of green summer cover,

only the ivy persisting over thin-
skinned clover— as if the bones

of earth were chiseled finer,
our cue to take out sweaters

from the back end of the drawer—
And even the tiny moths I saw

alight upon the still-steadfast, still-
flowering clump of sage and lavender,

slowed their wings in the shadow
of the sun’s pale alabaster—

Nights grow longer; so we learn to keep
best what lasts through now and later.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Talisman

You couldn’t stare, open-mouthed,
at the pock-marked moon, expecting
an amulet to drop like dawn’s first perfect
pearl of dew, did you? And you didn’t think
the heart of the lotus— or that red, red heart
hidden in the fronds of the tropical tree—
would give up its treasure without exacting
a price from you? Who knows how many nights
you’ll need to stand there, just like in
the legend: opening your mouth, your guts,
your insides to the punishing dark,
before some jury says Enough, no more,
she’s done her time, let her off easy now?
The only thing I know most days: that stubborn
pebble called hope, impossibly stuck in my craw.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Thimble.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Hyperphagia

This entry is part 2 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

There’s a votive candle with a picture of Santa Barbara
in her teal colored robe flickering in the middle
of our table, and a faded prayer in Spanish on the other
side of the glass. There are swirls of gold and orange
on the chalkboard over the bar, wreathing the names
of the evening’s offer of cervezas: Dos Equis, Modelo,
Corona, Tecate. Between bursts of music, the clatter
of silverware, the steady hum and static of voices.
We lick the last of the guacamole off the appetizer
plate, but we barely make a dent in the pastel
and sweet corn tamales. Is the waitress disappointed?
She brings three plastic take-out boxes and sweeps up the tab.
It’s the middle of the week and almost October; the dark
comes earlier. Somewhere a train is always pulling away.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Pledge

My dear, she texted late last night, if you can spare me something, I need it for food, for medicine, for things in the everyday. How could I not respond? You cannot say, But I just sent you something less than two weeks ago. Mother, sometimes I feel the days slip like water through my fingers. And then the cycle of worry rotates— paddle wheel, boat going nowhere, ferry stuck between the shores of departure and arrival, while sun-worshippers zip by in motorized rubber boats. Putting away books on the shelf, I came across a friend’s inscription in a journal, given years ago. She wrote, Looking forward to our forties, when we will have made it; to our fifties, when we’re settled, and to our sixties, when we will look back at our lives to celebrate the harvest. I set it back and ponder this assurance: something I have never really had in such pure and unadulterated form. I am the queen of making-do, I’d joked back. I’ve saved all manner of odds and ends for use on a rainy day. Wrapping paper, shampoo samples, gift bottles of wine. But there is no contentment in these miserly economies, mother. I bite into bread, or fruit, or cheese, and some part of me shrivels with the shame of being unable to share these morsels with you.

 

In response to cold mountain (60).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Triptych

If I were a leaf, a thorn, a sapling bent by wind— And you do but don’t believe, when I tell you how at seventeen, I stood up in the darkened cinema (one of two in my hometown); the usher in the shabby cardigan shone his flashlight up and down the aisles, calling my name because my father had phoned the manager to ask that I be ordered home.

*

If I were a knot, a burr on the surface of wood— You would not say so often, Weep then bear up; crumple then cease, endure, transmute. Transmute, as the heart of darkest wood yields coils that might still shine, after the axe— Onyx or anthracite, or something more domestic: yes, sorghum dripping from a spoon.

*

If I were fairer or less coarse, less complicated than a modular plot— But I am always the immigrant, wed to a handful of exit visas. Spring is a relief after the two-plot designs of rain and summer, rain and heat. Of the parched heart, a poet once wrote: come upon me with a shower of mercy. Sometimes I think spring is kinder by far than love.

*

 

In response to cold mountain (59).