Author Archives: José Araguz

  If the ocean rises over me while I sleep. Before the whaling ship and garbage barge.   If the volcano I can see from the supermarket erupts. Where the tree line ends, the caldera and the lake.   If … Read More

  History, I say, with its high ramparts, its engraved swords. I say the bees are falling from the skies, the apple blossoms will not come into bloom this year or next. The fish gorge themselves on plastic. Or I … Read More

  1 Rain in an unused pool   Lack of attention is a kind of dirtying.   We are tension stretch. We are land filled   beyond our fill. A landfill where boys and girls   stir and sort, sift … Read More

  We watch lit horizon for a signal. When it comes, the sky looks like rainclouds, except heavier, funneling upwards, dragon-shaped smoke over mountains. Flames. The opposite of rain. We’re piling clothes into suitcases as if they could save us. … Read More

  The time has come to write poems about everything, with everything: with Judge Dee’s prose (so precise, scientific), with cartoons by Milton Caniff, Frank Robbins, Alex Raymond, with Bompiani and The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with the … Read More

  How are the dots connecting? I know how my taste is formed. It’s already on the first page if you see the world in stories, as I do.   —–   Here’s the first story: I am. And the … Read More

  In my hour to read Sweetman’s Van Gogh, order seeds for the garden, frame a print, I stood instead at a window, watching you children wild with joy at a wild, twilit sing-along with a chorus of robins, light … Read More

  Your body diminished at my touch. It hurt, though who I’m not sure. Don’t stop loving me I said, being brave. But it was a dream—love, and my speaking of it.

  I dreamed I forgot who I was—the last woman to love you. You knew me as a girl, when joy was edgeless, and required no work. Cinquefoil in the field, our knees green. In the dream I was laughing, … Read More

  The wind gossips, though most everything stays sleeping, the stars in the black pouch of heaven, stones, the unexceptional foliage, poor wind with so much to say and no one to say it to.

  It was a relationship of listening. Listening while we ate dinner or sat on the couch. Listening while you answered my questions. Listening while you complained about your ex-girlfriends. Nodding, as if I understood. I watched as you told … Read More

  Give her the name of the longest river in the world or call her river. Either way, she will collect and hold and move everyone from one place to another. You will look into her sometimes and see the … Read More