BIO
William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile, 2010 International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, 2013 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prizeh. His work has been published in American Poetry Review, AGNl, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry MagazineTin House, , and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US. He was featured in Spotlight on Hispanic Writers, Library of Congress. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon.
All Things Dark; Argument for a Migrant
What I’m saying is
he descends without a guide,
more or less insane,
down like a robe
lit by a match, waist-deep in the waters
then stalagmites rise and stalactites fall,
only to find a translation
he knows too well how simple
it feels to feel strange.
What I’m saying is
stumbling back to the light,
he retraces his steps, out
to their gilded cross, bent knee
on the shore out to find
the shipwrecked Spaniards.
No one deserves that entrapment,
not the dealer, not the pope, not the day
inside the body of a bag.
No brimstone, just skillful order
getting doped on the way delegates
rephrase the facts,
something in the flak
when walls go up,
the way you give up
or get off the ground
because there’s a belief
like kingdom come,
that you are generous
that you can make another human being feel good.
What I mean is
It’s dark in here, bottlenecked into the desert,
the color of clot, of a godless god,
but he’s done with that, lost enough to admit
there’s always something foul that takes hold
how simple
it feels to feel strange.
something cunningly
doing the dirty work.
All Foot & Bone for My Insomnia
For my Central American students
They will tell you
I smoked weed, that I kicked
my mother in the ribs, that I shook her loose,
couldn’t hold a baby or a job,
whatever it took to incarcerate me.
Is it too much to ask
for the footsteps still out
in the brush. Hand over the dollars
or drown. Brush of bones, brush of
discarded clothes. Let me show you
when night comes its sweet smell,
its rough earth. Follow the trail
or they’ll take you for dead.
Whether I’m a boy with a soul
or a dog with a mind, they’ll break
my stiff collar break the whisper
of a moth. I have no choice
but to walk it, risking the thought
of losing the only moon
in my pocket. All this to say
I am tired of the mind falling behind.
All this to say there’s a bus
enveloped in flames. How long
beneath the tooth-shaped
mountains. To walk the desert
I need a mind to sleepwalk
constantly walking back
the hours, the whole tract
to believe in one more day
piled on all the other days
plodding trails. I can’t go back now
and I can’t explain why I cannot
concentrate, but I have so much
faith in my legs. Don’t tell me
I’ll grow accustomed to this place.
I know. I plugged my batteries
to get here. And I’m willing to bet
whatever can flesh me
with what’s to come
I will scratch. I will dig and growl, but I will not die
like a hairy carcass.
I’m more than that. More than the maggots.
More than crickets. Let the coyotes
do their best with the empties in my belly.
My mind goes on like this
over the rugged road, broken
cricket making a pilgrimage.
How ignorant to believe
my biography is all foot & bone.
After all this time
no one was watching.
Echo Park Poem
I’ve got that Johnny Pacheco
kind of feeling tonight
and I want to drop it
like a 4 x 4 in the middle
of the road, break it down
like it’s Africa, 1974.
In Angeleno Heights,
from my bungalow window
strung with retro Christmas lights
I can see in the dark
the buildings, downtown, sick
with their own sweats, indifferent
to the shopping cart, monolith
of a mattress beneath the palm tree.
There’s an international agitator
in my kitchen who’s got
the blues and his alligator boots,
a blathering feeling that matinées
are the best time for b-movies,
for the most part film noir.
Everything in my Echo Park
bungalow is an off rhyme.
Not like the oblique Emily
Dickinson, but more like
Antonio Carlos Jobim,
Desafinado, Cheo Feliciano
scrolled tight into a bass line,
terse, imaginative
and utterly funky. It’s true,
my bungalow was a nightclub
in some hole in the wall
in Havana, but this time
everyone gets to keep
their money, carousing
like trains by the turntable,
some wrapped in tobacco
leaves, some a bit of rum
to unloosen the tongue,
others philosophizing about home
and whiskey, top shelf. All the shots
are the same and all the shots
are good. I got that saying
from a little Irish man
outside Dublin. Such is the story.
Today the gentrified streets
of Echo Park are far
from my feet. Now I know
I want my hands over the table
the way Bill Evans hunches
over the piano. All night,
I’ve orbited the moon
of my inheritance,
three parts coffee, two parts milk,
a pinch of sugar to beat
the devil out of his mind
and come up complete.