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

Hallucinatorio

(after Roberto Bolaño’s “A Stroll Through Literature”)

1. I dream of blood that wells from a cut, uncoils its wavelengths of sequestered light, turns more solid than the furniture in my house.

2. In my dream it is Lent, just like it is right now. Guardia civil are herding babaylanes into yellow Humvees. Their bandannas, knotted under the chin, catch the glow of sunset. The vehicles rev up and head toward the hills. When the dust settles, the townsfolk find they cannot erase the ancient writing that has formed beneath tire tracks. It becomes their new epic poem. They will read it every year. Movie producers will come to film it.

3. In my dream it is still Lent. Which can mean any of a number of things: penitents stripped to the waist, their heads wrapped in sack-cloth, their brows circled with crude vines or barbed wire. Their backs: red labyrinths, ladders gorged with flame.

4. In another dream all the lilies have open vestments. The children come to gather pollen in their cups. Every eyelid will be streaked with gold, every finger outlined with knowing.

5. I dream that in the ruined chapel, above carpets of moss, a cherub ziplines toward me from the belfry. When was the last time you washed your face? I ask my soul. It likes to play in the mud, where it is cool. It hangs its head to one side; it doesn’t like to brush its hair.

6. Donde? Aqui, aqui.

7. In this dream, I knock on the door of room after room until I come to the one where Prinsipe Florante is lashed to a tree, bemoaning his fate. If I turn the right combination of locks hidden in the leaves, we will understand each other perfectly, in monorhyming quatrains filled with lyric and metaphor. And the lion will slink back into the darkness from which it came.

8. In this dream I gently cover the woman’s mouth with my hand, lead her into a room which has temporarily been stripped of all reminders of her sons; I bathe her fevered brow with water. If you lived her story, you too would be crazed. Later in the night, the oil lamp that should have ignited the revolution the first time, will burn down the governor’s house.

9. In this dream it is many years since you have touched me. By this I mean the premises have fallen silent. Sometimes it is not a dream.

10. The poet leaves: she is outcast from her hometown. Does she drink? Chew betel nut leaf? Swear like a cargador at the pier? Gamble away her children’s inheritance? Smoke cigars with the lit end in her mouth? Take lovers, including her maid? Wear only pants? Burn her bra? You have no imagination if you think this is all it takes to be a poet.

 

In response to small stone (71).

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Ground Wires

“…let everything you own ascend to a heaven of pure abstraction” ~ D. Bonta

 

When a child is frightened to tears, no matter the cause, pull on her ears and recite several times, Maykan, Maria Luisa, di ka agbut-buteng.

When there are too many bundles of paper stashed in the attic, remember that any of them can be used for kindling.

When there are pins and needles on the soles of your feet, forego putting them through the ceiling.

Instead, put some spit on your index finger and mark each instep, saying Kurus, padi, di ka agkut-kuti.

When in doubt, offer one more piece of fruit, one more unblemished egg, to the gods.

How many times has weather been forestalled by such gifts?

It’s not just mackerel: admire the smoky blue swirl of their sleek bodies lying side by side in the pan before heat transforms them.

The soul can be hailed with the sound of little bells; with bright pennants of color whipping madly from a string; with cooling beds of taste.

Squint to the left and you will see the row of guardians perched on one side of the pagoda roof. No one remembers to take pictures of them.

 

In response to How to teem.

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Bel Canto

This entry is part 3 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Courage is the first of the virtues,
because it makes all others possible. ~ Aristotle

 

Sweet wind that trembles the first shoots sprouting
from cracks in the walk: it is such little things
that most undo me. For instance, I know it wasn’t
the a capella voices in the high school choir we heard
singing Laudate Dominum tonight, that ruffled the leaves
or brought on the sudden evening shower. And yet, each
young face, so plaintive and perfect above concert black
and white, pulled at the edges of reverie. From open mouths,
notes of praise hovered, poured full before descent and
dissolution. Isn’t it true there is hardly anything
unconnected with any other thing? So I must believe
that there is nothing merely in the manner of a tangent,
that each bud blooms in the way a code becomes more
and more apparent. In my palm I cradle a phone that
only hours ago, carried a message from my mother—
I am so sad, she wrote. I want to ask for your help,
whatever you can send. What heart would not sing
everything it could muster from the depths, every
tendril, even the ones just beginning to turn green.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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Cusp

This entry is part 1 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

On the wall, a poster of the body’s meridians: every point on the palm, on the sole of the foot, a little signal that knowing fingers can decode.

The shoji screen is paper and wood. Or if you like, grain threshed, pulped and pressed into a frame; tensile bamboo coaxed upright from leaning too far out over water.

Face down on the table, I can feel knob by knob how the rungs on my spine lengthen, align.

The spicebush sends up its haze of yellow, the magnolia its tumble of sweet pinks. Underneath the scumble of bark, parts of wood look shiny, as if washed in egg.

Face down, I breathe through the paper towel laid across the headrest and think of how in the water, this might look like a dead man’s float.

Do you notice how one side of every face looks slightly asymmetrical in relation to the other?

I bought a pair of metal earrings from an artisan at a fair: one engraved surface said “un”, the other “usual.”

My hair has grown longer. Mornings are too quickly warm. On the porch, through a haze of hair, I like to listen to things that warble.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Soundings

“Do not attempt to say everything at once.
Take advantage of the fourth dimension: time. ~ D. Bonta”

 

Who remembers how the index finger slid into circles on a rotary phone, going around the wheel? Each number released, bringing voices closer through the ether.

*

I’m not very curtains, said our landlady, gesturing toward the blinds. Above each window frame, a scarf of crinkled white cotton, looped through hooks on the wall.

*

Overheard at a meeting: Ontological uncertainty. The oscillatory drift between states of desire.

*

Why don’t you tilt your head back in the swing before pushing forward again?

*

An invisible umbrella connects nine dots with four unbroken lines.

*

Citrus, tuberose, gardenia. The woman holds an acrylic cube filled with coffee beans under my nose. Vetiver, patchouli, musk.

*

Gas light flicker, wind in an accordion. Ache and catch in a tango passage.

*

Fluted sails on a boat going downriver. Something too expands in my side.

 

In response to How to talk.

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Compass

It’s true then— every word’s a compass, pointing at least four ways; five if you count the rosy bull’s-eye that sits in the center: inscrutable, stubborn or mystical, certainly not letting on. Not just two, which is what some believe ambivalence to mean. Take my father’s good serge coat, for instance: up close the fine diagonal weave and ribbing of twill, the relatively affordable sumptuousness of wool polyester; from a distance, whipcords or pin-stripe marching down a light grey field. Experienced fingers would know the difference. He liked to cut a dapper figure, match the colors in the breast pocket to those of the slip-noose ties. It was a time when shoes were made of real leather, buffed and shined by spit, a swipe of polish. The sky in summer had the chalky quality of canvas. Seersucker and madras, burlap and raw silk— the wind blew its humid torch equally through every window. The sun wrote its progress in swirls of turmeric and ink. Heat or no heat, everyone mostly walked to where they were going. Old history books have engravings— foreigners in the tropics, top-hatted and walrus-heavy in their layered suits; their long, spindly legs sheathed in hose, their women in petticoats and laces. Here, on the first warm day of spring, I slip into flip-flops and cotton voile. I’ve snipped the leather buttons off an old cardigan, saving them for some unknown occasion in which I might revive their charm.

 

In response to cold mountain (32).

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Thaw

Warmer days, light that fades later and later. Finally we can fling the windows open. The clasps grate and rasp, like throats gargling salt water first thing in the morning. Rooms crammed with more than winter’s fat; eaves with bits of leaf and twig, blinds lined with ledgers of dust. The drawers groan with socks and scarves, the pantry shelves with unopened cans of beans. I want to scrub all the corners, scour the tiles in the bathroom with bleach— even the stripes of grout between each one. I want a pot of yellow strawflowers, a bowl of blood-red tulips, nothing else but the mellow gleam of wood in the middle of the room. I read about ascetics and what they chose to renounce. Sometimes I think I want that. Sometimes I want to be both the mountains emerging from their heavy robes of ice and snow, and the streams they feed below, rushing and teeming with color and new life. Sometimes I want to be the clear unflavored envelope of agar, other times the small mouthful of sweet azuki bean entombed like a heart in the center.

 

In response to cold mountain (31).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear shadow,

This entry is part 72 of 73 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

 

it is certain you’ll travel to what waits
ahead: not the intersection with its lights

already changing, not the fringe of rain-
spattered fields nor the road unbuckling

toward dusk. Even the lone truck you might hear
starting and stopping, engine running as if on

empty, will fade from sight. Just like
at the optometrist’s, when the technician

asks you to look through the viewfinder
and straight ahead at the red barn

with a silo and no stick weathervane. Then
she’ll blow a puff of air into your open

eyes, before sliding the window down.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.