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

The Summer of the Angel of Death

This entry is part 75 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

It started out simply, a game
of little questions as she ironed
a stack of laundry in the afternoons

while I colored pictures at the table
and rain drew circles on the windows—
What would happen if you went to school

and discovered you’d left your lunch
and had no money in your pocket? or,
What would you do if you came home

and the doors were locked, and no
one was here? I don’t remember when
the hypothetical problems became

more difficult to ponder, or if my mother,
pausing in the rhythm of her labors,
considered the metaphysics of these

further tests. Next, she asked questions
that seemed to be about other persons,
say, the neighbors next door: What

do you think would happen if one day,
you woke up to find your parents
had died? I’m sure it was only

to prepare me for the difficult
uncertainties of life, to begin
to teach my mind to cultivate

the detachment which comes
of acknowledging what it can’t
ever control. I can’t remember

if my dreams were suddenly
clouded with locusts and plagues,
if blood bubbled upon the waters;

or if I ever saw in them the angel
of death waving a sprig of rosemary,
walking on the grass and passing

beneath the trees which trembled
slightly, even those whose leaves
were toughened by a long summer.

[LAG-signature date=”09 06 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/09/06/159121997″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Bearing Fire

This entry is part 74 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

We get up to rain and fog; or rather,
smoke— the swamp still burning

in the month-long aftermath of
lightning strike. Not even a hurricane

could put it out. Whatever else one
might say, it is a form of dedication.

Name your materials, then: peat and fossils;
ethyl alcohol, grains soaked and swirled

in a silo of glass. Little clutch of wood
shavings; cone of paper, puff of breath.

Coals in a tempered dish. Some light
to take you past the midnight hour.

At a conference many years ago,
a Persian poet I didn’t even know

looked at me and said, Your stomach
is tight; don’t try too hard.

And it’s true. Don’t we want,
so many times every day, to unclench?

The world looms close. Only look up
at the brilliant fall sky

and the silver gleam of a plane
glancing off the buildings.

Somewhere in the woods, a bright
clearing where a tree came down.

[LAG-signature date=”09 05 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/09/05/159121995″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Gleaning

This entry is part 73 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Glyko Karythi: Green Walnut Spoon Sweet [Greek]

What falls, will fall of its own accord
because the season dictates it— acorns
and chestnuts on the ground, leaves now
beginning their russet plunge. No sword

needs to sever the filaments, no word
except what blows, mostly unseen, through
the late hours. Sometimes the light thud
of a globed body: hard green pear, gourd

bitter with unripe longings. Fall’s rewards,
we think, are tinted scarlet: apples, late-
blushed nectarines we gather, moving from tree
to tree. But also the rough, raw, blurred.

A stinkbug on the railing drops, not quite unheard,
to the porch floor. The seed’s housed in a shell
that cracks to metaphor. I marvel at how walnuts
packed whole in honey were once hard, uncured;

but yield all, steeped long in sweetness, complex art—skin,
flesh, bone you could cut, clear to the wrinkled heart.

[LAG-signature date=”09 04 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/09/04/159121993″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear recklessness, dear jeweled

This entry is part 72 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

O, to grace, how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be.
Let Thy mercy, like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to Thee.

~ “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”

Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
hummingbird buzzing into the teeming
garden, I’ve followed your dizzy trail
these many years: from bed to bed, down
mountain trails, across oceans, to the last
bergamot flower’s four thin flagons nearly
wilted in the shade. So long I’ve dreamed
of climbing into a harness and zipping
across swaths of hidden forest, where
no one has yet catalogued the dream-shapes
of ferns and flowers beneath the canopy;
or dropping from a little plane with you—
one quick tug, and the pocket of silk
billows up like a mellow flame, its
rustle an ineffable name, to bear me
back down to checkered ground.

[LAG-signature date=”09 03 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/09/03/159121991″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Lost Lyric

This entry is part 71 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Shh. Say nothing of the racket of jays
in the crown of an oak, commotion

of feathers every which way—
I don’t know either how to find

the way back to the garden; only
now there is everything to say.

Moths lie still on the mesh
of the window, light

being the project
never quite done.

[LAG-signature date=”09 02 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/09/02/159121989″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dream of the Four Directions

This entry is part 69 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

In a dream, an avocado tree in the backyard:
winds in typhoon season hailing fruit too high
to pick— In a dream, fluted shapes beneath

its branches: plumeria and ginger lilies.
Fragrant spikes turn brown at summer’s height,
wings folding back into the tree. Can you name

the shopkeepers all along the road into town,
opening their shutters in the morning?
The bakers have been at their trade

since well before the break of dawn,
pinching the yeasty hearts of bread
before their crusts darken at the touch

of flame. At the intersection, little boys
wait with rags to buff and shine the crowns of
leather shoes, and stray dogs roam the alleys

with hungry eyes. I turn and wonder
how the lake’s four corners have folded
into a handkerchief; how, looking

straight up from the street, the church’s twin
spires are compass points spinning slowly and I
their dizzy fulcrum, planted on the ground.

[LAG-signature date=”08 31 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/08/31″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Currents

This entry is part 68 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

The beginning, or the end
of an affair? Water obeys

the tidal surge. Last night’s moon,
liquid wafer. Coin that pays

for air so clear today, sunlit
leaves green as June again.

[LAG-signature date=”08 30 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/08/30/159121982″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The Lovers

This entry is part 67 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

A restless wind turns over leaves
and enters, searching through the house
when we unlatch the windows.

*

Cobblestones emerge from under
veils of water and moss to turn
their eyes toward the sun.

*

What star is crossing rapidly toward another
in the heavens now? So glad for them, I turn
my face toward the light of their passing.

[LAG-signature date=”08 29 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/08/28/159121978″]

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Charms

This entry is part 65 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

What did we hear that morning?
The sound of deer running through the woods;
and from over the ridge, that highway whine.

You said, The left hand is for warding off,
the right for receiving. I tried to remember
the sequence of gemstones looped around the wrist—

peridot, bauxite, rose quartz, crystal, amethyst:
each one strung and tuned to the heart-strings.
So we reverberate to each other’s calling:

silence is a desert hung with midnight stars,
the thrum of quiet waking. Somewhere a wing,
rippling air that the other breathes.

[LAG-signature date=”08 27 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2010/08/27/159120967″]