JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ, "ON THE TIMES I DON’T REMEMBER THE RIGHT WORDS FOR THINGS" (Issue 17)

ON THE TIMES I DON’T REMEMBER THE RIGHT WORDS FOR THINGS

Tonight, leaving work after a double shift,

   what is left to say on my walk home,

in and out of conversation with myself,

dims and leaves me surprised: hone o oru,

   a phrase I read, I couldn’t say when,

comes back clearly, scratched across a book’s flyleaf

with the words it might translate to in English

   (to break your bones, or to have a bone

broken) in pencil scrawled and smudged beside it,

as if whoever tried to work it out stopped,

   unable to choose between doing

the breaking and being broken, and left both

phrases for me like answers to a riddle

   no one is around to ask, and which

I no longer have the breath to decipher,

unable to read the growing night against

   the headlights of oncoming traffic,

each pair of lights indifferent, reading past me—

another breath slips, breaks my conversation,

   words again have a falling leaves feel:

the feel of a foot driven into the air

of a missing step, that braced stagger, the feel

   of reaching for a door you thought closed

only to find it open, your artless hand

on the air you have to walk through to move on.

ABOUT THE POET

José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and author of seven chapbooks as well as the collectionsEverything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His writing has appeared in Crab Creek Review and Prairie Schooner. He runs The Friday Influence and teaches at Linfield College.

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