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

Ghazal, with Bird Singing in the Dark

The child says: At five, I wake because
the bird starts singing in the dark.

The wind is wordless when it peals, unlike
cathedral bells struck to ringing in the dark.

What does it say? she wants to know. Empty
your pockets, begin unburdening in the dark.

I’ve slipped from one love to another— some robes
are tight; it’s hard undoing stays in the dark.

And the bridal-wreath bush glows brighter than the sheen
of a rising moon, clearing the tops of trees in the dark.

What is the wind saying now? Leave your personal history behind
like a too-small shoe, or else you’re always fumbling in the dark.

And what of the bird? It’s always there. It never leaves. Old age,
sickness, death underline its caroling— Dear child, awake in the dark.

In response to Cold mountain 36: Old age, sickness, and death and an entry from the Morning Porch.

—Luisa A. Igloria
04 16 2012

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear animal of my deepest need, you want to linger

This entry is part 18 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

in the shoals, harness dangling, haunches wet.
You want to stand just like that, mouth hanging open,
blinking, stupefied by all the light, deepest gold
and apricot just before it shades to velvet, thick sludge
of indigo poured into the inkwell. You want to trail
your tongue along the braided silt of the estuary,
send your moans running with the tide between the banks,
not caring whether the tourists in their little paddle boats
might hear. Days without end of the same gray dawns,
the same dun noons; petal flutter of small white moths
against half-closed eyelids. I don’t want to be the animal
caught in amber, relic before its time, beautiful in ruin.
The smallest tokens of life undo me: filmy lattices
of pink-white blossom; sweetshrub, pale froth of sea
holly. Tell me please before the light goes in:
where do I go, where can I run, from here?

—Luisa A. Igloria
04 15 2012

In response to cold mountain 34, 35 and an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Intermission

This entry is part 17 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

It’s late. It isn’t yesterday anymore. The hour has moved beyond that part of the sundial. Up in the woods, soon the witch hazel will leaf a low green flame. Yesterday we picked our way through hellebore, through foxglove, through belladonna. Above, the heads of snowball viburnum drooped low like lanterns. I turned a question I cannot voice, over and over in my head. No one will hear its soft bumping in the corners, no one but me see the flare of orange tracks in the velvet dark. If I said it aloud, all this softness would fade in an instant. The lambs’ ears would shrink and recoil, the creeping flox and the tiny fingers of salt cedar form crystals like ice. See the roses massed on the trellis, the rows of spiked thorns on guard at their feet.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Some stories

are best written out by hand, in fine
black ink with an old-fashioned

fountain pen with a modest, polished
carriage and a solid but flexible nib—

for instance, this story about how
my mother was a farmer’s daughter

who married a lawyer twenty years
her senior. They met the summer she

tended the cash register at The Midway
Restaurant and Bar in a sleepy northern

town on the coast, trying to put herself
through college. When I was a girl,

she recounted how he used to come in
with the same group of his friends in law

school, not so young men newly hopeful
in a world after war, all wearing suits

despite the infernal heat: cravats, hats, one
good pen with its small gold arrow clipped

like a talisman in the breast pocket. Oh
but after food and a few rounds of drink,

those ties were loosened, and even the shyest
could make bold to stagger over to the counter

to invite the girl with the perfectly shaped brows
to sit at their table. In another version of this

story, my mother says he threatened to break
every single wineglass on the counter to get

her attention if need be, if she refused.
The rest, as they say, is history. A few

months later, in the cathedral, as family
and friends looked on (my mother’s poorer

relations on one side of the church),
they signed their vows: his signature

looped and sprawling, hers neat and upright,
every letter in its place, elegant as a pin.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Fire Report

This entry is part 16 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

The drone of planes against a bright blue
morning, winds that fan the charred smell
of houses going up in flames. One of the men
that has lost his home tells the TV reporter
how he picked up his daughter from her crib
and walked out with her into the day. And now
they have nothing. Nothing, that is, except
what they haven’t lost: thumb in her mouth,
sleepy head against his shoulder; curls
brushing his cheek, breath sweet with milk
kind neighbors put into a cup. He shakes
his head and repeats: What could hold
against such a conflagration? And yet,
night will not touch this cargo.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Mythos

This entry is part 15 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

How will you go about finding that thing
the nature of which is totally unknown
to you? asks Meno. I don’t know, dear,
I want to say; or, you ask far too many
difficult questions. Does the wren’s
endless chirping sound like a query
about immortal life, about what the soul
might have brought in its carry-on luggage
when it traveled here from its previous life?
You talk about anamnesis, or what the soul
knows innately so that it should be no
big shakes to meditate upon and recollect
these in the here and now. So then why
do I wring my hands, most days, from not
knowing the littlest thing? Weather,
for starters, but not only; more crucial,
those big important questions that rattle
at the windows all night long: like how
much time do I have to get my act together
before curtains? When is the intermission?
Or, can I go out, just by myself for a long
walk, and not have to come back so soon?
It’s April but some flakes blow about
in the wind, each lacy cutout different
from the others. You catch a few of them
on the edge of your dark sleeve before
their brief outlines melt. Their souls—
where do they return, and do they bear
back with them all that radiant and
intricate design, spoked like a wheel?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Kissing the Wound

This entry is part 14 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

For Lent, the rule was no sweets, and fish
on Fridays; less music on the radio, less TV,
less rowdiness and laughing in general (but one
could giggle behind one’s hands if necessary).
And on Holy Thursday we went to church to see
a row of unshod men seated before the altar,
waiting for the priest to wash and dry and oil
their feet: the plumber, the carpenter, the banker,
the fire chief, the kanto boy, the grandfather.
On Good Friday flagellants paraded down
the streets, vermillion stripes growing across
their backs, rude thorns circling their brows.
And in the evening we visited six or seven
churches, tiers of votive candles keeping vigil.
In the middle of the aisle, statue of the body
crucified, laid prone on a cloth of blood-red
velvet. After all these years, this is what I
remember most: the cold, pale arch of the foot,
the painted-on wound on painted flesh which,
bending, we were meant so reverently to kiss.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Lament

This entry is part 13 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

What would I give to be a vein on the side of the red maple whose leaves tremble in the wind? I want to be plucked like that again, tuned to singing. The bees stumble into the storm door and later, there are clumps of yellow, tracks the color of fenugreek or pine bombs or birch. Little pools by the road film over with pollen, daubed thick as paint. The light can hardly strike where all this matter congeals. I cannot ignore it. I cannot turn away. I want to scour every pot I own until each grainy bottom reflects a face which used to match the corona of blue flame heat for heat, glare for glare. Every now and then I crave the iron taste of swamp spinach, the thin scraps that tether marrow to the inside of bone. Something true, unapologetic; something that doesn’t merely settle into the background, fade into the atmosphere, trick you into thinking this is all there can be, and nothing more.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

From a reporter’s notebook on the global conflict between reason and irrationality, which eventually spawned the Endless War

Scientists report that several moons go missing almost every day. They are never bigger than three feet in diameter. The rarest ones smell faintly of roses. The rest merely resemble extra large thin crust pizzas.

This morning, swirls of gold under the surface of water mean the koi have come back. Wisteria in loops above the fences nearly obscure the edges of barbed wire.

A thud was heard from a church pew somewhere at the rear. Above the screams of children the choir took up its canticle. The organ’s timbre rose to join the crescendo.

 

In response to Dark Things by Novica Tadic....

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

O orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone—

“Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.” ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

O orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone—
But I know this: the little stone survives the flame of days,
keeps whole its chiseled heart. Don’t weep from sorrow anymore—
The days are longer, and the evenings grow more beautiful.
O orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone
that it might arc across the filmy water better than
a bridge. Don’t ask about the draught that you were made to drink:
new wine or bitter herbs, return them now to earth and slake
your thirst instead on what is clear. That light, that love. Be still,
o orange swirling flame of days. So little is a stone.

~ for Jennifer Patricia A. Cariño