Sometimes you can see straight to the murky bottom.
Once there were wishes thrown there, fitfully, flickeringly, wild
as an extra coin to spend on an extravagance like the future.
Once, a girl shut her eyes to the wind’s insistent I-told-you-so.
I don’t know if she found her way through the eye of the storm and into
some other side; I don’t know if her stubborn heart was as strong
uphill as it was down. But then sometimes I see a cloud in the shape
of a fin or a tail, and I remember her: how she used to sing without words
and touch the whorls in the wood, as if they were levers to a secret world.

—
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of 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. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), 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), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.