Author Archives: José Araguz

  This spring we planted again, turned the earth and pushed the seeds into the ground with our thumbs just deep enough, then covered them with the compost loam that we had cooked throughout the winter. Then there, buried in … Read More

  I, Your mirror, lie in shards.   When the color left my cheeks, You   left too.

  —after the 1976 Hindi film Laila Majnu   Death is not so cruel.   Does the nightingale not see the bleeding rose, how she tears her collar, her very flesh?   He is mad, she pleads. He is mad. … Read More

  Look! God descends+++ like fog upon the city, +clouding mirror, horizon— +offering little more than the illusion +of dream. ++++The parched ++hold their tongues +++to the air, ++++heavy with water. ++* * * Smash your idols, He says. We … Read More

  —after Faiz   He found in the leaves a mixture of dread and shaking hands. He smiled just once before death.   The lake flowed in the wind like a river and there the skies smelled like Pakistan of … Read More

  is a revolution long in the planning, crocuses rising up despite the night’s   last frost, their conviction enflaming the wide lawns green with reckless youth.   Now, everywhere, we see the zip-gunned hummingbirds returning, the red splash   … Read More

  Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so —Sonnet 54, Shakespeare   Bees are dying in swarms and soon the flowers. What is a sonnet without a red red rose?   What is a rose if sprayed another color … Read More

  after the Islands of Chagos para mi Carlos Arturo   After Tuvalu, did we really try hard enough? One, two degrees, chronicles of floods. Still around us are deniers full of gods and facades.   A house of seashell … Read More

  A blizzard wraps me in white shapes, white lies. Uprooted too soon, I seek omen in a bed of white earth.   My mother once said, Go and find where and who you are. Go and search for rebels … Read More

  By the time they plugged me in— electricity enlivening me the way God courses through the socket two bodies make— the man was already dead and did not know how tightly they held him to steady his head, so … Read More

  I’m tethered since the man on the ridge,   limited to the path between the backyards and the cemetery.   This body is a rope that swings me over want’s abyss.   I am weak, succulent, a magnet for … Read More

  To keep them trapped, the doomed office workers’ heads are rigged to explode. It makes sense in that movie-logic way—   bombs masquerading as trackers, some vague lie about company policy & for your own safety. The point is, … Read More