Markus Åkesson

Sunday Afternoon

From Café Florentin
on Giles Street

everything is yellow—
Sunflower trim

Thick paint on door-
knob and frame

Emerging from cardigans
lemony wedges

of shoulders turned
up to the sun

The bubbly yellow crust
of my hot

croissant au jambon
with cheese

The woman in the vivid
red blouse

with dark hair
and the man in corduroy

slacks are kissing
And behind the speckled

counter the surly
waitress is ringing up the till

Transparencies

I will never marry, never have
children, declares the youngest daughter

holding the crotch of cotton underpants
under the cool of running water

This is something they all say
soon after the first blood comes

She doesn’t have to wear chemises
or lie on an old roll of bedding in the corner

but she divines how light can pass
through the bones of crackled celadon

as if to gild as if through
skin as if to set apart

from Three Brass Rubbings
           
Dragon (Cambridge)

It’s said luck follows those 
born in the year of the fire-breather, 
a time blue with the sticky, fluted
scales of rain-moths.

When we walk in the streets,
our clothes and cheeks smeared
with the tarry silver of their smashed
bodies fallen through windshields
of air, we know they herald
the long rains.

What pure love or temporary 
blindness propels them forward,
as though singed by visions of cows,
barns, thatch-roofed castle keeps
going up in long breaths? Bronze
flames to shishkebab them in neon,
tattooing the brave song of a thousand
tiny hara-kiris on puckered flesh.

When I glance at rooftops, conspiring 
gargoyles glare and stone angels lift 
their heavy wings, webbed from the base 
and held together by marble joints, not 
some homemade paste of honey
and beeswax.

And that socket of liquid silver 
in the sky, that open eye— how easily 
it might pick me out, stubborn traveler 
on the open plain, clutching a sheaf of paper, 
cunning fetishes dangling from each 
foolish ear; provisions I will loyally 
rise to defend as beautiful and not 
entirely useless, like lightning rods.

Nevertheless, the heart drums a fervent
prayer for salvation: my soul, then,
only so much chaff, notwithstanding;
any second now, waiting to go up 
in a puff of smoke.

Luisa A. Igloria is one of two winners of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Open Contest for her manuscript Maps For Migrants and Ghosts (due out from Southern Illinois University Press in 2020); and the winner of the 2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize  selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She also won 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. Full length authored works include The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), and Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press). In 2018, Luisa was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. Luisa teaches in the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. www.luisaigloria.com

Luisa A. Igloria’s Website

Luisa A. Igloria at University of Notre Dame Press

Luisa A. Igloria at WordTech Editions

Luisa A. Igloria at Old Dominion University

Luisa A. Igloria at Via Negativa

Luisa A. Igloria at Solace in a Book