José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press), Small Fires (FutureCycle Press), and Until We Are Level Again (Mongrel Empire Press), which was named a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, The Windward Review, and The Bind. He also works as an editor for Right Hand Pointing and Airlie Press and runs the Instagram poetry project poetryamano. He is an assistant professor at Suffolk University where he serves as editor-in-chief of Salamander.  https://thefridayinfluence.wordpress.com/

 

La Llorona at the Border

It is not children she wishes to steal but time,

not a river but distance holds her reflection,

her black hair the sky, tears on her face streaming

into each other, roads on a map that keeps

unfolding. It was not her child she buried that day,

that day that keeps occurring every time

her story’s told, not a coffin she stamped

down into the dirt, but a heart. She marked

the spot with her braid, chopped and tied it to

a cross made of twigs, vowed to grow it all back.

Now, her screams scare children, multiply

the shadows in their rooms, become gossip,

like: I heard she doesn’t just steal kids,

she drowns them, drowns herself every night.

Not a child but a man on the other side

of a river, a man smuggled between milk crates,

sleeping on the concrete floor of where

he has found work, falling asleep each night

to the same dream, his knees knocking against

his chest, the faces of others seen in flashes

of streetlamps, his tongue drying to a paper

he has written his name too quickly on. 

Not a child but belt buckles left behind,

trucks that rattle like cages, frayed and faded

baseball caps, boots of stretched and hardened

skin. Not a child she keeps searching for

each night she walks, not a river but distance

keeps unfolding her reflection across

a horizon that keeps shifting with each step

she takes towards a border barring nowhere.

—appears in the book by the author, Small Fires.

Tantalus in Matamoros

Before he died, my mother took me 

to see my father in prison. 

After saying hello, 

I was hushed and kept aside. 

What words he spoke and cried over, 

what forgivenesses

he asked – I reach for them 

and pull back different words each time.

With this memory, I grow 

thin, less and less of me 

stoops, trying to drink of

these waters. When they recede,

the story of a man left to longing

returns, to be told in human breath.

—appears in the book by the author, Until We Are Level Again 

Performer

On Chartres Street, I admire the Living Statues.

At every word called out to them, I check

the lines of their faces to see if they have changed.

This one in gold is good, is most like stone

and seems to never hear what’s being said.

His glow is like the glow I had around me,

instead of a street, a fire on a ranch,

instead of camera flash, a flashed command:

Habla ingles. This was after midnight,

when the adults had drunk enough and started singing.

The other kids would push me and a girl

close to the fire and tease: Habla ingles,

ella quiere. Shoulder to shoulder with her –

I must’ve know her name, but that word

was not important then, that word held still

so others could be summoned – I couldn’t see

her face. Laughter broke as the crowd called out:

Dí novia, dí amor, dí boda y flores.

Their laughter was the sound of expectation,

a sound like the coursing of a fountain,

which is the sound of water made to move

and fall and fall over itself, a sound

I heard again when older and alone

with a girl who had just finished asking

for me to speak in Spanish: Say something

beautiful – her name, how we met, her love

of being in the room as I spoke to family –

all of it fell as I focused on the glow

of the candle I had lit for her, having

learned how to set the mood from watching

movies where this kind of thing would never

stop the hero, a hero who would have

done more than just sit there silent, my face

unmoving – I had hardened it to stone,

waited until she walked away, as the crowds

here walk away, but didn’t know what would

happen after, how stone comes back to life –

I never learned to collect my heart like the hat

left at the feet of this man so good

at playing stone, laid out for anyone

to drop what they can spare.

—appears in the book by the author, Small Fires

Meditation on the Seconds

My childhood was dust motes seen only in light

I had to come upon: the leaves outside

on summer afternoons, thick light turning

     on the wind: on the way to her eye,

my mother’s liner brush, a waiting dab

of light at the edge of so much dark:

Corpus Christi Bay seen from the highest

     curve of the expressway at night,

headed towards what I knew then as home

after having been in Mexico

visiting what my family once knew

     as home, the lights on the water

sparks and glints that left me dark unto

myself. I felt I was only real in moments

of passing light, and had but seconds of

     a life – the lone streetlamp

in the park, the fireflies’ to and fro – that dust 

is made of so much falling gone unnoticed –

the train’s spotlight fixed across the tracks –

     little seen of what’s ahead. 

—appears in the book by the author, Small Fires.