Louisa A. Igloria is a tenured professor at Old Dominion University, where she directs the MFA Creative Writing Program. Louisa is the author of Ode to the Heart Smaller Than a Pencil Eraser, winner of the May Swensen Poetry Prize (Utah State University Press, 2014); Night Willow (Phoenicia Press, Montreal, 2014); Juan Luna’s Revolver, winner […]
Summers, the football field that bordered Burnham Lake transformed into a carnival—canvas tents streaked with dust; midgets and untidy animals unpacked and left to sit, blinking, in the sun; until someone remembered to send a boy for water, or caught the smell of soured droppings on clipped grass. I imagined their sometimes month- […]
In a hotel with cobalt paint and yellow trim, one room had only books and windows, and no clocks by which to tell the time. One room was a well within a shaded garden. Another had only silence for furniture. One room once held a prisoner of war—its walls covered with messages he scratched on […]
He comes up the walk to her door, whistling and swinging his cartful of birdcages. They hang from a pole in bare light, fingers of soft wood whittled thin for holding in what could flutter any moment from the field, through an open window: brown sparrow, starling, plain house finch drawn to the sill by […]
When he re-enters her life the trees have begun their preparations for the world’s slow receding into white. She sits on a bench watching sleeves of color falling—rust and yellow, strips of feathered green, pooling on the streets where men sweep striped restaurant awnings clean and carry the damp wrought-iron café chairs and tables away […]
La indolencia de los Filipinos… on the boulevards, where a mural assembles nightly. Bodies the hue of scrap metal beneath train tracks, feathered by neon. My friend the pathologist walks back to Manila Hotel, cuts through the park and comes across lit fires in iron gratings. The third eye of a Sanyo rice cooker blinks […]
condensation that forms a line of drops across windows so a finger could draw connections— A face leaning close, as close as one could hover next to another to propose a point from which to begin— […]
Two Excerpts from “Postcards from the White City” World’s Fair, St. Louis, Missouri; 1904 Bridge of Spain, moss-spackled corridor of war; decayed wisteria. Among divided flowers, a riot of bees. Axis of invisible lines. In some museums your lover can stand beneath a cupola—whispers unnerve, lick at the ear like a mouth, […]