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

Precaution

This entry is part 28 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

It’s that paper-thin hour just after rain, and the windows are open, and fragments of sky are visible behind a haze of leaves. One by one the lights come on in houses down the way. The odors of supper fill the air: charred meat, boiled potatoes, onions. The smell of wilted greens does not carry clean, unlike the tang of mint from the garden, the neighbor’s jasmine. A voice on the radio talks of this time last year, the soldiers raiding the fugitive’s safe house, the helicopter letting them down in the cabbage patch. The burial at sea with no witnesses. And now the neighbor is working on his back gate, taking advantage of the good hour or so of remaining light. Lately, he’s taken to smoking Cuban cigars; the sweet, leaf-smoky note adds itself to what’s gathered: an odd bouquet. He’s put in a small solar panel attached to a motion-sensor light. The frame of white plastic tilts up among the ivy. I watch as he tests it and it flickers on, a warning flare of yellow.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

A single falling note above

This entry is part 27 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

this chorus of blossoming: some unseen bird,
calling the echo that returns, so each

joy’s doubled, brings back its twin—
Whatever name you might give it, whatever
undertone it rings, each bright ripple

shades toward deepening. I used to wonder
what it might feel like, pushed closer
toward the front of the line— place

of dubious honor: the one called on
by whatever might demand a reckoning.
My hair not all completely grey, my hems

not fully rent or frayed; my nerves, my hands
not all quite wrung. I know the days we file
away will not return; this light that pulses

like music in a cage, go under the velvet hood.
The silver bar inside will swing as gently
even then: its occupant, slight of muscle,

heart large as a sea, will dream of trinkets
thrown into the depths. O, nothing’s ever lost,
only unseen, those times the light goes out.

—Luisa A. Igloria
04 28 2012

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch and Cold mountain (44, 45, 46, 47).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

This entry is part 26 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

and wind cleared the tops of trees, and passed;

the sun’s brave tribute dropped beyond the ridge.
On TV, the British laureate talked about the role

of poetry: how solitary events might meet the public
ones, disrupting the quiet of the page. The other

poet spoke of growing up in a town built from
the clanging of car parts, machinery— by the hands

of working men; and of his father’s love of Russian
novels, the ones filled with orchards and train

stations, characters fraught with the drama of too
much thinking and drink; love, desire, both, all

of the above. What is the essence of poetry?
asked the TV host. I didn’t catch their answers,

from trying to remember the scenes that led
the woman in the direction of the approaching

train, from trying to think of what the season
might have been; whether yellow leaves were

pasted to damp ground, or if she wore a coat
with a collar, because the morning was cold.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ghazal: Some ways to live

This entry is part 25 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

One summer we hiked to my grandfather’s farm. Ninety degrees in the shade, sandaled
feet stumbling in carabao dung. I did my best to look as if I knew how to live.

Five days a week I used to teach in the capital, six hours from home. Riding the midnight
bus, I saw families huddled in sleep by the underpass; how was this a way to live?

Every now and then I’ll remember something with a start, like fruit I had in childhood.
Bell-shaped macopa: red skin, cool, spongy hearts. Their taste, hard to re-live.

A cross between indigo and purple— this is the star apple’s signature. A five-
fingered flower, pulp thick and sweet, encasing the seed that might live.

The waiter brings my usual bowl of noodles in clear broth, a pair of battered shrimp.
For the umpteenth time I tell him: soup spoon, not ladle— the mouth’s hinges would give!

I love the way light moves across surfaces: the floor beneath the bay becoming
honey, water rippling itself and what holds it in. A window’s essential, to live.

In a darkened room I stretch out and practice: slow down my breathing, arrange arms
straight by my sides. Imagine how cells quit movement, the compulsion to live.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

That shore from which we first pushed off, how far away is it now?

In the morning, by the kitchen door, paper-thin strawflowers hold out their yellow bowls. The brass bell I bought from a temple gift shop swings under a branch of dogwood: a little more weight every day, as shoots erupt and buds crack open. Even verdigrised, you’d think the light is mild, is mellow, brings nothing but the gooey oil of blessings. Who’s to say it isn’t so? And yet, and yet. Even when the wind keens like the tool of a glass-cutter bent on dividing surfaces into a liturgy of smaller parts, a screen assembles. Don’t add my name yet to the names of the dead on the wall. Don’t carve their letters edged in gilt on a crypt. Just today, I thought of how, in place of a fence to put up around a yard of my own, I’d plant jasmine— so when its asterisks of scent opened on warm nights, no one could tell where their beauty or their yearning for the other side began.

 

In response to Cold mountain (41): Whenever their final day arrives.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Devotions

This entry is part 24 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

“…Mothers weep in the corners of those paintings
while a man, each morning, sweeps the church floor.”
~ Connie Voisine, “The Altar” by George Herbert

Every day, dirt prints on the kitchen floor,
and under the furniture, thick new pelts
of dust. Perhaps this detritus that gathers

is the sediment of dried-up tears? Taking out
the trash and pushing the bin against the far end
of the driveway, I see petite roses in bloom.

Blood-red, pressed between the fence and the water
meter. Pitimini, once I heard a woman call them:
she made floral arrangements for the church, came in

the side door of the rectory, careful to take off
her shoes and coat in the vestibule. Unrolling sheets
of newsprint on tile, she laid out ferns, divided

showy chrysanthemums from tall gladioli; and, finishing,
tucked the slighter blooms in between the hardier stems—
baby’s breath, those miniature roses. Her hands did not seem

to mind delving into their cache of sharp hooks,
guiding scratchy stems into clear vases filled with water.
I cannot remember whether she was Isabel, or Delia, or Florinda.

She came to freshen the flowers every other day, before the sun
was up. I don’t know why the ghost of her name meets me here
at the end of the driveway, pointing out the flowers.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Rift

This entry is part 23 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Unto every one that hath shall be given, says the sky:
and so the flowerbeds spread their skirts lined with mulch,
and the odor rose into the air, mold of wood mingled
with the fragrance of budding things. And the frost
that earlier rimmed the outlines of each blade
of grass: overtaken by rain, so many needles
running stitches into the earth.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Founding

This entry is part 22 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Of brass and iron, of bronze or bell metal, a house
within which the clapper might sound— What slips

into the wind, sometimes slight as a prayer?
A warbler’s call before it fades,

the curl of incense bearing the names
of all we’ve lost, all we seek—

Hour upon hour is struck: diligent notes that echo
to the yoke and crown, to the waist and lip—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Night Watch

And if I say heat, expected rain, lassitude— the hollows of my bones begin to mimic the throats of brittle plants. I was seized by thirst, reading a catalogue of inks: morning glory, transparent blue as raindrops on its cheek; moonlight, brazen crimson of azaleas. Purple berries, named after the lady-in-waiting who wrote the first novel. The names of women were not even recorded in her time. I think of her, restless on her sleeping mattress, mining the indigo shade of night after night for illumination. Green sentinels of bamboo; ochre fields, stalks bursting with grain— each pointed like a nib.

 

In response to New year's resolutions: the most beautiful thing.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Mountain Haibun

“…paths worn ever-steeper by joy and sorrow.”

Sometimes, on the one-lane road ascending through the cordillera, the vehicle is merely inches from the edge of the ravine. We listen for the sound of gravel, expect their skittering to hit the faces of rock below, but nothing: only the sound of the wind combing through pine, the trickle of a distant waterfall. The slightest press from fingers of fog, and the bashful mimosa curls, leaf by leaf, into itself. Before the sun goes down, the driver pulls up at a lean-to and the women and girls file out, squat behind its corrugated shingle. The men stand in a row, impassive before a length of limestone. This is a bathroom stop. It is at least four more hours before the township comes into view with its rest houses, cantinas, a lake whose name in the local tongue simply means “water.” Someone startles a flock of blackbirds in the bushes; there is laughter, the smell of cold bread rolls shaken out of paper sacks. Only the tungsten yellow lights from the bus cut through the darkness and the fog, arcing with each turn.

We’ve journeyed so far, suffered so much on this road.
Only the lizard, if it fell through these oceans
of fog, might live to tell the tale.

 

In response to Cold mountain 37.