Animus

It comes floating up from the depths:
trailing scarves of pond scum, ancient

body flaccid now but the old hate still
flashing dully in a few umber scales. Once

I bent my head to drink from the green
waters, and with the first swallow

was betrothed. I was not taken away
to a kingdom of glass and mirrors,

to a country where night was changed by
day. My life was a spell: a series of small,

daily surrenders. My captor taught me
of anger, how fists find hollows in walls.

I was not supposed to stand in the way:
was meant to give and bend, lie still, let

the ordinary life settle over me as a fine
net fallen on every surface. I look my terror

in the eye and ask what brings him out of the old,
dank silence; how much of his own life remains.

Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry for Caulbearer (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and twelve other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for eco-poetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor, along 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, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University; she 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.

Animus

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