Author Archives: José Araguz

  is left unsaid though his features speak it and the color of his voice, his choices. He carries his father unsteadily, as once his father hoisted him high onto the crags of his shoulders or lay on the floor … Read More

  Spring is not everything, but it seems to be the answer. God is here, stretching her green knuckles to set the heart aflame. That other spring, when I turned eight, my mother threw away my dolls. Off the balcony, … Read More

  As a kid I’d lean against the right wall of my room and with a pencil draw a horizontal line that revealed my height alongside the passage of time: age climbing up the wall. Today if I pass by … Read More

  —after Sylvia Plath* here what you see is the intent to express the frame once concealed with ornament once unimaginable here flowers made as if cut by machine, as cog rotating hopes here glass, here metal frame here limestone, … Read More

  My son asked me how can she keep a baby from her parents like that I think about her the witch as I cut off most of my hair in the mirror midnight split ends on marbled formica I … Read More

  My mother carried an old man on her back after she fled Vietnam. He was small and shriveled, like a mummy, limbs broken and reassembled into a folded child. He had a musky smell to him, like river mud … Read More

  Everyone said it was the largest tree they had ever seen on a street in New York. Some said anywhere. The city sent a small crane, then its bigger brother; then, when that was not enough, a third used … Read More

  stopping with their chimera cameras departed currencies they want to see where the Bedouin coin necklaces are thread where the Druze cross-stitch their dinner mats devourer of spiders but we only write of your heady zenith as sons stand … Read More

  from your opening will come an era of inconsequence an adage without donkey or kettle to prepare the glacial faces for their wanderings in a place where the ants are already surviving better than we each day, you flick … Read More

  If you knew anything about deserts, you knew there were scorpions. So when one appeared in your yard, standing where the crosshatched patches of grass met the beginning of a field, you thought you were in one, and your … Read More

  Weed-scrabble, cropping for the hungry earth, this wet morning, young robin clutching at old ivy, berrying the fruits of autumn’s windfall. In the cemetery, apples. I am out of season, untrued wheel, a sour note, and yet there must … Read More

  Shallow, uneven, breath of an infant. The eyes are rock pools at low tide. Bones in the face are the face. No life, no expression. Not sleep, not illness, not the eternity-clouded expression of the newborn. Pot shard, mussel … Read More