Author Archives: José Araguz

  my body sheds new life, over & double. i was told both it was sacred, it was filth— in other words godliness i do not care for. my folklore says you could feed a house spirit with excised blood … Read More

  Awake in bed I listened to my father tune up the guitar, the big, black songbook opened to any one of his dozens of favorite songs—Shortenin’ Bread, Hard Travellin’, Wabash Cannonball. I listened hard for Big Rock Candy Mountain, … Read More

  My children have been excused from the table, have picked up their plates, half-nudging their chairs in with their narrow hips, and jangled their silverware all the way to the sink. My mother is already in the sideyard picking … Read More

I. One morning in Paris, +++++she alighted ++++++++++on the Orangerie. Hadn’t she, as a girl, loved Monet? ++Had each jigsaw of greens +++++++and blues not cohered +++into a lily, had she not let him +++++++daub +++her vision, ++had she not … Read More

From draft to draft, I see the translator’s tension headache, a grind of molars. +++++++++++Despierto entonces de mi propio +++++++++++grito, the close of Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Dormida.” +++++++++++Awaken myself with my own +++++++++++screaming Langston Hughes translates at first. Eventually, he … Read More

  +++—after Sylvia Plath I’m a reusable canvas bag. A hotel without enough bedrooms. Winter injected in a snow globe, only water beneath its glass dome. Ivory from palms not elephant. An oyster’s mouth without any sand. I’ve eaten the … Read More

  I know that I can do it because I’ve done it before. Crafting birdhouses, I mean. When I was a kid, my mother implored me to finish my times tables, but instead I slipped into twilight and slapped a … Read More

  In my last moments, before I coughed my guts onto the pavement, while hot wind raked my feathers, she, all beak and awkward neck, leaned over me, craning to meet my eyes. She was so tall and took up … Read More

I’d just been to Goodwill ++and the recycling center when I pulled up beside the other Lauren ++returning from a run. I was feeling light, blithe with the lifted weight ++of unwanted stuff dropped off ++and I let the car … Read More

  I. The last time I saw Gloria, my Jamaican grandmother, her ghosts had brought her to a New York night club. It was 3:35 pm on a twenty-first century Tuesday, but for her it was 1945 and midnight. She … Read More

Noun 1. a musical instrument of the viol family Simple enough. It sleeps in its box the way a fox might sleep in a hole. 2. violin Not exactly. A fiddle isn’t frills or trills or college educations. It knows … Read More

  Your mom’s been up all night with Marlboros we bought, and their smoke snakes through her hidden closet vent to hang above your sleeping head. At dawn, I tiptoe to the bathroom and she flicks the light off. No … Read More