By Luisa A. Igloria
which Abomination are you?
The quiz bait: Are you an ass lobster,
or a guy who’s just trying to jerk off
but there’s a bird lizard yelling at him?
Do you prefer ham or olives in aspic,
vodka or cranberry tonic? Are you
the one twerking barefoot in the middle
of the room, or the one taking Polaroids
throughout the party, like Warhol did
to mask his social anxiety? One could
go on. Every square inch of the triptych
is a thick soup depicting every type
of folly and the weird. But I’m looking
intently at those circles in hell, where
every dark congress should be sentenced
that’s stripped the people of their rights.
The bird in the poop-colored high chair
should take them one by one into his mouth.
Then they’ll shit pearls of ill-gotten wealth
while armadillos savage their breasts
for extra. Here are the armies of murderous
police, still wearing helmets; they’ll be skewered
by avenging angels with the mangled faces
of salvaged children or dogs. It’s a sad
and terrible country where the ears
of innocents are pinned together then
cleaved by a knife. Migrants and minstrels
and poets are also there, though they’ve been
chained to machines. They make a kind of music,
though the notes are tortured out of their mouths
and their bodies are strung like harps from the trees.
~ after Hieronymous Bosch
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 the chapbooks Haori (Tea & Tattered Pages Press, 2017), Check & Balance (Moria Press/Locofo Chaps, 2017), and Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015); plus the full length works 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. Visit her online at www.luisaigloria.com.
