You are tired of what cloys, what heavies your tongue
as if to coat your body in whipped oil and vinegar. You are drained
and puckered as a sheet left too many years in salt water, then parched
as a plant struggling to keep its rousable nature. You close your eyes and imagine
fruit as color in tiny cubes pared from cathedral windows; the light in them,
pap of washed sweet rice. You return to the time you don’t know peach or apple or navel
orange—only the gold of mangoes, coral sweetness of papaya ripening on a tree
in the backyard, resembling a goddess: garland of breasts full to bursting
atop the pillar of her body, open hands gesturing and calling you to eat.
Luisa A. Igloriais the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry (Black Lawrence Press) for Caulbearer (2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), and 11 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask as the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. Luisa is lead editor, with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, 2023). She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program at Old Dominion University and also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.
