Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
The Sonnet Issue
2012
24th & Mission BART station laundry
hamper wide screen television Dupont
Circle cassette of my sisters voice cassette
of my fathers Court House Metro
torn photograph of my grandfather
Untitled by Malaquias Montoya smart
phone theater programs my fathers
gold watch boxed up photographs lap
top Fair Oaks the Mission Noe Valley
skateboard Mandorla the New
Yorker Venus in Fur Sex with Strangers a few
DVDs Pilgrimage PALABRA I was a short
skinny boy Midnight in Paris Yuba Poppie
depression My Vocabulary Did This to Me
2012 first appeared in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, issue 16: 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of After Rubén, (forthcoming in 2020 from Red Hen Press), His Tongue a Swath of Sky (a limited edition chapbook, momotombito press, 2019), Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010), and Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press, 2005), as well as the editor of the anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award. He directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. A native of San Francisco, he divides his time between Arlington, Virginia, and South Bend, Indiana. As a translator from the Spanish, Aragón has had a hand in a number of books, including volumes by Francisco X. Alarcón (1954 – 2016) and Federico García Lorca (1888 – 1936). More recently he’s been rendering into English versions of Rubén Darío (1867 – 1916). His translations have appeared in Chain, Chelsea, Jacket, Nimrod, and Zyzzyva. Other web pages for this author on Beltway Poetry: Francisco Aragón: Summer 2007 Francisco Aragón: Museum Issue