Luisa Igloria

folio

Letter at the threshold of oblivion

If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?”

—Emily Berry, “The End”

We can have salt, perhaps. Trace
of linden flower in coil of slow
wind. Or is that the scent of some
new petroleum byproduct? We can have
torched cowhide. We can have dissolution
of karst, lime-colored scales, chalk
marks left by the last surge of tides.
As for lovers— we can say their names,
one for every bit of glass found underfoot,
then discarded. The amber-colored ones,
so difficult to forget. The end of a trail,
gloss of a milky sky divided by power
lines. Which tower can we climb tonight?
Don’t say anything that will give it
away. As for grief and death: we
can scratch the sign for door on sheets
of gypsum. We can trail our hands along
the ghost of a shore where whole
countries of whales once sang as they
arrived on the beach before expiring.

I weep from a dream of the goddess

who sits with her shoulders above
the clouds, goats and tin-roofed
houses dotting the hills of her green
quilted lap. As upon waking,
there's always some state of emergency.
Drought, a flood, animals trying
to surface from out of oil-
marbled waters; famine, war. Even so,
it seems I can deal with those parts
better than the one in which she squeezes
her breasts so the milk flowing out
turns into rice. Rice-rain pours
down every granary, and the people hold
rice feasts, make rice wine, feed pap
to babies tired of sucking on
old, dry-knuckled fingers.
But hunger is always hungry; it won't
ever be appeased. I weep from the dream
where she squeezes so hard that blood
flows out of her breasts, wild red
rice still highly prized to this day. I ache
from the effort she made and the thought
of the sacrifice that never ends.
You can smell it in the air: the deep
wells of our sadness, the fog a milky
bandage covering the gutted earth.

Thief of Moons

Half-moon blade, mezzaluna, edge
I rock back and forth across
the face of a wooden board: my best
instrument, how I tune you according to
the tides. How my breasts float like two
new planets above your central hollow,
veiled in the colors of sunrise. I am
sharper than rock, more subtle
than steel. The sky and its collection
of dead stars lies quiet around my
shoulders. I've lain my spine across
your length: a birthing chair,
intimate with my blood and fluids.
Every child I've brought into this
world comes through the two points
of your smile. And at night,
I rest my chin in your dead center,
both hands ready to pluck
what light I can before it steals away.

Portrait, with Paradise Receding in the Background

Sometimes when you speak or sing,
it is sunlight flashing semaphore-like
from the surface of mirrors. It is thirteen
hummingbirds hovering for the promise of nectar— 
They make a jeweled necklace more brilliant
than the brocade of peonies on a woman’s dress.
Sometimes when you think you’re alone, another
face floats on the surface of the one you bring
to the mirror; perhaps, the ghost of who you’ve been.
Or the lover you hope to meet, who is also looking 
into a mirror, trying to divine how a whole
world curls around the bodies of fish 
rounding each blue bend in the river; how
like music or the sight of tears, there are 
things that have moved you without leaving
their trace on skin. And yet the hummingbird 
says it’s enough that you can bear parts
of the world smaller than a dewdrop or pearl. 
You can consider the moon’s invisible satchel
and its upraised handle, its offer to fill
or pry open; to empty, arrive, travel again,
to carry in its folds only what you can.

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. Originally from Baguio City, she makes her home in Norfolk, VA ,where she teaches in Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program; and at The Muse Writers Center. In July 2020, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship in April 2021. http://www.luisaigloria.com/