JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ
EN LA COLONIA I CANNOT FIND
I dream in a house filled with winter,
a house always between stages. My aunt,
in the country where I am a child,
watches as her dream house develops:
walls of cardboard and wood planks
make way for cinderblocks; doors
to each room go from bedsheets
to knobbed, solid doors; the floor
remains dirt long past childhood,
past when I stayed there, long into
the stories I hear of deals made
with narcos to keep safe the house
I used to dream in. Her house different
each year I slept there, memories
now different colors, the bottoms of
my feet the color of the earth
I walk across feeling winter, each
small step picking up more of the earth.
My aunt paces, wanting more for herself,
each step as dark as mine. In dreams,
we talk in the same house I try to place
years later on a map of Matamoros:
not the crowded colonias near the bridges,
nor the populated, street-lined center
nor the blocked-off Zona Industrial.
My eye veers further down dark swaths
of map, unmarked and undeveloped,
one road straight into the open fields
and ranches of makeshift shacks
and shacks shifting, made into
the country we find ourselves
dreaming in now. We counsel
each other in Spanish and English,
say we did not know, no sabiamos,
what the country would be like,
nor what would happen there.
We walk amidst changing walls,
our steps marking the path,
and the path marking our soles,
the earth molding to where
I relive nights of winter,
of not knowing
this is the nature of longing,
of faith, of not being satisfied.
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*** ** ***
CUSTOMS
A child, I hide El Presidente, wrap a shirt around the bottle. I can hear the amber fluid as it lays secret at my feet, each glug as the car idles forth says: lie, lie. My aunt rolls her window down, meets my eyes in the rearview: ¿Sabes que decir? I nod, my jaw tight. The river sloshes and sways underneath the bridge; each car shifts with shaded conversations. I hear laughter, cringe. Hear the smacked chisp of impatience, wonder what I’ve done wrong. When it comes time for the script, my teeth knit hard against themselves with each word: You a U.S. citizen? I count out three clicks of teeth before my aunt says yes. You have anything to claim? Two clicks, no. The man looks to me – I try but cannot see his eyes, his sunglasses reflect a silver world where I’m made smaller, double, as if given two choices, two strange lives across the faces of two rivers – U.S. citizen? One click rises clear over the glug of my heart before I can answer, before I can gulp over the engines, the river, over the silence to say: Yes, sir.
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*** ** ***
BLACK-EYED DIRGE
Death in twisted mesquite trees
in your ashy skin and spit
in childhood memories of wanting to look clean
Death in the handshake and the nail-biting
in the fear of the unknown
in the way things we do not know constitute the world
Death and its unknown face ignored,
become background to what is living, to what we know
Death in the man in the bushes you read about in the Caller-Times on a visit home
you remember nothing else from that month
Death behind the Black Eyed Pea restaurant
in the same parking lot shared with a Wal-Mart
across from a Circle K and Best Buy
facing South Padre Island Drive and Everhart
Death in the same parking lot you made your way across hungry
in the white noise of passing cars and passing lives
in the oceanic silence of a city at night
in the silence that is not silence, not the absence of sound but the distance of it
Death in the distance between each person so that our lives do not resound against each other
in what you imagine fills that distance
in what was considered a shadow, then a dog that wouldn’t move
Death in the shouts at what was not a stubborn dog but a man
Death in the restaurant abandoned, excavated, emptied
in the man abandoned, excavated
Death in an ambulance where a body is bagged like a suit to be delivered
in a body bag full of nobody, no known thing
Death now a restaurant hollow as a chapel without believers
without celebration or ritual
a home for the things we do when not dying and losing our names
Death a visit home, newsprint mussing its inks with yours
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*** ** ***
NIGHT MATTER
In a house without electricity, what matters
is having clean paper, and enough light for words.
Crouched at the window, by the streetlamp’s light, I write.
When the light clicks off, ask my hand if it matters.
Even when I can’t tell what word lays at my fingers,
I know the force and heat is my matter.
My eyes make out the paper as a glow
registered by some animal sense that makes it matter.
The night sky fills with bits of shell and bone,
or so I write in ink, in night-matter.
Since men learned print/No night is wholly black.
since I learned night, my print is holy matter.
Frost spoke of being acquainted with the night;
having words with it, neither wrong nor right, is another matter.
You who read and move on to other matters,
the night knows who between us must do the dying.
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*** ** ***
CONDITIONING (AIR STUDY)
Conditioning is what is done with
soldiers, the heads of children
and dogs, what is studied
in the swipe and tap of
our fingers across screens.
Conditioning is
your legs red at noon,
the concrete of a city blurred
by the same fever
falling in sheets
of sweat down your back,
your head ringing,
swimming in light – Conditioning is
the hubris of weather by button,
the shift-of-belt-buckle mentality of:
It don’t matter even
the holes in the sky
or the waste in the water,
we can fix this, fight
the sun’s mad knuckle.
*
Your aunt hates it when you block the fan
while she watches TV. Any time you do,
a sandal shoots past your head
and smacks the glass
like a fish flopped on concrete,
that sad sound of being
out of place. You are used to it.
Used to sunflower seed shells
popped between teeth
counting down each salty
second. Used to the shells
collecting in the trash
like the black and white
wings of some creature
that has to be gnashed at
for the summer to pass.
*
Walking down the hall
and feeling the cold
seep through the cracks
of other people’s places
is an exercise in memory;
thoughts of faces
working outside
when the sun scolds
skin raw, forgets
how to hold back;
thoughts of another life
where you walked down streets
until your shoelaces
were bit away
to the knot,
where you held a small
fold of dollars
like aces
allowing you to sit
a little longer, hold
a coffee in a diner
a little longer
when it got too bad
outside; thoughts of
how it’s always bad
even when it’s not
your hand anymore
or your back
just your impoverished
pride walking beside you,
feeling the cold
like whispers of
heaven, how
heaven might mean
being set aside
and not allowed to go back.
*
Down the aisle of a bus
with a broken A/C,
a boy follows his mother,
his whole body shoved forward
by the clamber
and shuck
of a stop.
His open palm
hits his mother’s waist;
she swats it,
switches
her cell phone
to the ear closest
to him. As she descends,
the boy’s fingers
trail the sky
and spread,
letting through
light.
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*** ** ***
QUESTIONS AFTER THE ELECTION
In her story
about being told
by her white bosses’
white secretaries
Vote Trump! You
better vote Trump!
as she punched out
from work
as usual, tired
and body-sore,
does my mother know
she gathered
the darkness of each
corner of the factory,
and the darkness
of the drive home
switching between stations,
nothing sounding right,
and the darkness
in her mind
listing
all the work
waiting
for her at home,
and the darkness of
the night over
Corpus Christi,
and how these
darknesses spill over now
into every word
I’m urged to write,
because nights like these
are ink, and her story
of pretending not to hear,
but telling me
what she heard,
what was said,
is a story of darknesses
being separated, made distinct
as words on a page,
which hold darkness
in one form until
we close our eyes
and darkness shifts
to darkness
shifted—
at the end
of her shift,
does she know
about the darkness
I will hold
for her?
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JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ
José Angel Araguz is the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, The Windward Review, and The Bind. A CantoMundo fellow, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College.
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A Dozen Nothing 