Tag Quinceañera

* tom murphy & moving adelante

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

tom murphy

The poem above comes from Tom Murphy’s chapbook horizon to horizon. One of the things I’m moved by in the poem is the way the form mimics the conceptual space the speaker is contemplating. Standing before the  mirror on the “First mother’s day without ma,” the speaker positions themselves in a new place, a blank page of sorts. What follows then is the completion of a simile started on one side of the page/mirror, a simile that finds the speaker detailing into “gnawed” and “cracked” imagery, feeling age as sunlight through a “clapboard barn,” as well as feeling it down to the earth. From new awareness to the complicated meaning of awareness, this lands on the page in a visceral way.

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I want to say a thank you to everyone for their kind words and good wishes in regards to the news of my second poetry collection, Small Fires, being accepted for publication by FutureCycle Press. The tentative release date is May 2017.

To further celebrate, here is a poem from the upcoming book (originally published in Luna Luna Magazine). I share it specifically because, as with Tom’s poem above, it takes on the theme of mothers and their impact on our lives. My own mother’s story is one of survival and persistence. One of her favorite words in our talks is adelante, a fact that I’m forever charmed by given that the word contains her name within.

Quinceañera – José Angel Araguz

The women of the house shook her from sleep,
and began to serenade, trying to mark
the air of another rite that seemed to come

too soon, the song her father should have sung
instead of barking, running her off, a song
with the momentum of a hand ready to skip

a stone across water, a hand which would
fall away soon as the song was done,
but not before a stone danced,

lifting and lifting off the face of water,
each time as if it’d never drop – past midnight,
the women sang, without ceremony,

without food, without a sense of how
to ready a girl to skip into the current
of her life, could only sing,

their voices cracked and strained, trying
not to wake her son who slept beside her,
a son who would grow up and dream of the night

these voices broke the air and raised a song
for the little girl his mother was,
for the woman she now had to become.

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Happy becoming!

José

* new poem up at Luna Luna

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

Happy to announce that my poem “Quinceañera” has just been published online by Luna Luna as part of their 3o Latin@ Poets/30 Days project.

This poem is a special one for me. I was allowed to go into what the poem means to me in a Q & A accompanying the poem. Here’s what I said regarding the poem:

What inspired to you write about a quinceañera?

 

The poem had its kernel in memory, which for me is at turns messy and marvelous. My mother gave birth to me when she was fourteen. She left my father a year later. In so many ways, my mother and I grew up alongside one another, surviving. Like most who grow up without, we didn’t know what we didn’t have until much later. One day while explaining about quinceañeras, someone asked if my mother had had one. I realized I had never had that thought, and that, after having me so young as well as leaving a relationship so young, I’m sure she never had the chance to consider it. I felt both startled and guilty as I realized that the struggle begun with my birth continued to that very day when I didn’t have an answer to such a simple question. This is where memory is messy. I found myself writing roughly around this feeling of being startled, of not knowing, until I pushed and saw what I did know. This is where memory is marvelous. I found myself celebrating my mother in the way given me, creating line by line a space where I was able to give something back to her. The line about the “son” dreaming startled me anew when I wrote it because of the permission it granted. It is a memory I wish I had.

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Check out the poem and the rest of the Q & A here.

See you Friday!

Jose