Youth
Youth is a pig, a certain nervousness.
Blindly, youth trots in,
makes its noise.
Its comma-mouth keeps running on.
You grow comfortable with youth,
stay up each night.
At every turn: rain, music, whatever.
Only later do you feel
(eyes red
from every bristle
of coming light) how
the husky snout roots through your heart.
To Silence
I never questioned
your meeting me here.
You’ve decided to hold
the place of my father,
no body, only
the air between us.
You slip behind
each word,
and crowd. Marching
beside my next breath,
which for you
is a kind of blank page,
I am learning
to get a sense
of where we’re going.
Click here to read José Angel Araguz on the origin of the poems.
Image: “Hey, Pig Feeder” by Paul Williamson, licensed under CC 2.0.
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog "The Friday Influence" and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. A member of the Board of Governors for CavanKerry Press, he is also a faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine. Twitter: @JoseAraguz, Instagram: @poetryamano, Personal site: thefridayinfluence.com
Latest posts by José Angel Araguz (see all)
- Two Poems: Youth and To Silence - February 2, 2021