#Luisa A. Igloria

[feral-ballad]

Luisa A. Igloria, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; "The kitchen girl's journal"

[Text ID: “To live a life, that it might be written— / that it might be lifted, whole”]

#luisa a. igloria #excerpts #writings #literature #poetry #fragments #selections #words #quotes #poetry collection #typography

[metaphorformetaphor]

Memory or dream, was that your kiss under my eyelid’s flicker? I miss you even before you’ve taken leave. This morning is full of the cries of woodpeckers— part ululation, part rusty hinge. Your heart goes with them, or forages among the stones with sparrows, trusting in what it finds. You never say So long or Au revoir, only Next time will be sweeter.

  Luisa A. Igloria, from "Letter to Love" Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014)

#Luisa A. Igloria #Letter to Love #Luisa A. Igloria from Letter to Love Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

[ilaw-at-panitik]

If I gave up, if I stopped desiring the ordinary things, ordinary rituals we hardly think about even as we do them— Could I forget, completely?

Luisa A. Igloria, from "Dear Exile," (Published in TLDTD, Issue 7)

#Luisa A. Igloria #philippine literature #poetry

[goliadkine]

Calling the Soul Back to the Body

It swings imperceptibly on the slack end of a clothesline. Dark hooded shape,

wings glossier than tree ear mushrooms, its marble eye fixed on my own. Every afternoon

I come to the kitchen threshold and there it sits; I almost want to raise

my right hand and swear with my left on the cover of a sacred book. It never stays

long—swooping into the bush to stab a worm in half before arcing away

into the sky. Vines settle back upon their blue-green cowl when it leaves.

Say to the soul, I know you. Chant a spell learned long ago: Maykan, maykan, di ka agbutbuteng.*

*Come back, come back, do not be frightened. [Ilocano]

Luisa A. Igloria, from Maps to migrants and ghosts

#Luisa A. Igloria #poetry

[nablah]

The Secret Language

by Luisa A. Igloria I have learned your speech, Fair stranger; for you I have oiled my hair And coiled it tight Into a braid as thick And beautiful as the serpent In your story of Eden. For you, I have covered My breasts and hidden, Among the folds of my surrendered Inheritance, the beads I have worn since girlhood. It is fifty years now Since the day my father Took me to the school in Bua, A headman's terrified Peace-gift.  In the doorway, The teacher stood, her hair The bleached color of corn, Watching with bird-eyes. Now, I am Christina. I am told I can make lace Fine enough to lay upon the altar Of a cathedral in Europe. But this is a place That I will never see. I cook for tourists at an inn; They praise my lemon pie And my English, which they say Is faultless.  I smile And look past the window, Imagining father's and grandfather's cattle Grazing by the smoke trees. But it is evening, and these Are ghosts. In the night, When I am alone at last, I lie uncorseted Upon the iron bed, Composing my lost beads Over my chest, dreaming back Each flecked and opalescent Color, crooning the names, Along with mine: Binaay, Binaay.

#the secret language #philippine poetry #poetry #colonialism

[gaiagalatea888]

”At the farthest edge of the present moment soaked in a pain of your choosing, you might touch the hem of transcendence.” -Luisa A. Igloria, from ”The line between pleasure and pain

[goneahead]

30. recommend any poem you want that’s not covered by the above prompts

Cheating and giving y’all two:

A Sense of Time I drive past my father’s grave and past the place where I began. That swing-bridge to my childhood games is now a town to which I seldom return. There the headstones wear familiar names, and there I turned the page at five to my first big word, repeating it until it blurred. The church grew smaller in the rear -view mirror; my face awash in the wind, I approached the curves I knew by heart, then drove the silent miles to Flat Bridge. The sun going down behind the hill hauled its net of shadow as it fell. ~Delores Gauntlett

There are songs my mother will not sing, nor listen to again because they remind her of the war; how, among rows of men lined up against a masonry wall, one closed his eyes and lifted his voice before the order to fire was issued. It was in a town bordered with rice fields, where palm crosses and braids of garlic shuddered in the windows. At night or coming back from a funeral, you might hear the voice of the fourteen-stringed bandurria.   ~Luisa A. Igloria

(I have never found a title for the second poem)

#goneahead reblog #answered #poetry asks 2022

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: QUIET TREE by DM Frech

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In QUIET TREE, DM Frech’s #poems are comrades, who share a dark dwelling, with quirky innuendos and retorts to our dilemma of existence. God, often in the mist, with a net to catch our predicaments and keep us from drowning.

DM Frech lived in New York City’s East Village as a modern dancer and attended New York University, Tisch School of the Arts completing a bachelors and master’s in dance. After sixteen years in NYC, moved to Virginia, worked at the Governor’s School of the Arts, got married, had two sons, was a realtor, and embraced fiction at the Muse Writer’s Center in Norfolk. She writes poetry, children’s stories, fiction, non-fiction, looks for shooting stars and hugs trees.

PRAISE FOR QUIET TREE by DM Frech

Like others who create art, or such things that a transactional world might dismiss as merely inconsequential, DM Frech ponders in one poem: “why should I care/ to leave nothing”? Quiet Tree leans toward those clearings where even brief lyrics might turn bits of remembered life, loss, and language into the currency of poems.

–Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia, Emerita

In Frech’s powerful collection Quiet Tree, grief and death take many shapes and memories appear haunted, how to cope in the ever-shifting present that refuses to detach itself from the past?

As the poem notes in “Chains of Flesh”: “Bound to chains of flesh I crawl the earth cast upon seeds of grief for I cannot fly cannot see beyond my shadow am forced to trust you will return over and over to find me not gone,” the conundrum to preserve or to let go seems impossible. How does one exist and make peace with loss and longing, with life as it is? No matter; from the moment we’re thrown in, these poems give it all in their deep and imaginative wonder, in the covered flowers, and coffin cards and gifts made of words.

–Kimberly Engebrigtsen

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

[bongoroid]

Song of Meridians

It’s spring, but in other places it’s not-          yet-spring. It’s dry, or wet with

monsoon, or it is why-is-there-still-snow-          on-the-ground. It’s strange and high,

that mechanical whine in the night, coming          from somewhere beyond the ceiling.  

It’s Wednesday, and in another place already          Thursday; it’s night, though here it is

still half-past noon. And look at the news-          paper: on the upper left, a woman in a pale

peach dress is smiling and waving her hand.          On the bottom right, there’s a picture

of cities burning: it’s spring, or whatever          season it is for laughter or slaughter, a

difference of one letter between one state          of being and another. It’s that time when cows

and sheep are calving, when blood is the marker          for a life breaking away, or maybe just breaking.

—Luisa A, Igloria

[chimpmoshpit]

from Absence, Presence by Luisa A. Igloria

[lindasaccoccio-7]

Saskia’s first poetry event on a chilly Thursday evening on State Street Standing with poets, Nicholas Scaldetvind, Jace Turner, SB Poet Laureate Emma Trelles, George Yatchisin and Cie Beautiful display of poems written after a workshop with Luisa Igloria~ Thanks to Emma & Jace for the work involved! 19 January 2023 #poetry #walk #evening #sblibrary #jaceturner #emmatrelles #lizardpoet #luisaigloria #saskia #bedlingtonterrier #january #2023 https://www.instagram.com/p/CnqCYJTvXXA/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#poetry #walk #evening #sblibrary #jaceturner #emmatrelles #lizardpoet #luisaigloria #saskia #bedlingtonterrier #january #2023

[metaphorformetaphor]

So it is easy enough to heft moments marked with nothing more than our ticking silences against such sorrows, and deem them  unworthy.

Luisa A. Igloria, from "My love, I want to tell you of today," Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014)

#Luisa A. Igloria #My love I want to tell you of today #Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

[asianartsblog]

Explore the complicated specificity of  the Philippine experience how Filipino Americans are seeing themselves today in this discussion with poet, Luisa A. Igloria; artist, Lek Vercauteren Borja, and authors E.J.R. David and Dwight Ong. Scholar and artist, Marlo De Lara moderates the discussion. This program was recorded on March 9, 2021. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbS3N4CU7Dg&t=459s

[goliadkine]

Song of Meridians 

It’s spring, but in other places it’s not- yet-spring. It’s dry, or wet with

monsoon, or it is why-is-there-still-snow- on-the-ground. It’s strange and high,

that mechanical whine in the night, coming from somewhere beyond the ceiling.  

It’s Wednesday, and in another place already Thursday; it’s night, though here it is

still half-past noon. And look at the news- paper: on the upper left, a woman in a pale

peach dress is smiling and waving her hand. On the bottom right, there’s a picture

of cities burning: it’s spring, or whatever season it is for laughter or slaughter, a

difference of one letter between one state of being and another. It’s that time when cows

and sheep are calving, when blood is the marker for a life breaking away, or maybe just breaking.

Luisa A. Igloria, from Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

#Luisa A. Igloria #poetry

[sophi-aubrey]

at the farthest edge of the present moment soaked in a pain of your choosing, you might touch the hem of transcendence.

© Luisa A. Igloria, The line between Pleasure and Pain

Ph. Alexander Petrosyan

#Alexander Petrosyan #Luisa A. Igloria #window #city

[fluttering-slips]

Where the Seed Scattered

She took us through dense rows out back where fennel spurted lavish through the ground—

branched green tendrils now hardening to husks amid long growth of asparagus. Inside round

shells no bigger than my thumb, next season's growth waited to root in layers above the clay.

Beneath the pear trees, in the grass, wasps buzzed in drunken stupor: the body in decay

still giving of its sugar, its thick and milky sap before composting into soil. Nearby, the flames

of peppers gashed the undersides of leaves: trapped heat of bird chilies, the smoky mildness of shishitos.

She said it was the only way she'd ever planted: allowing what fell, to fall where it would. Luisa A. Igloria

#Where the Seed Scattered #Luisa A. Igloria #poetry