BIO
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of six chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, The Windward Review, and The Bind. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.
https://thefridayinfluence.wordpress.com/
@JoseAraguz
excerpt from A Personal History of Want
CHAPTER ONE
age 17
"There is a story of us that has a life of its own, but it's not our story,”
—Mary Kay Letourneau
Some stories you can’t share without falling into them, as if each word set on paper falls under like stones you walk across, each word making up the road behind you, part where you have been, part where you are going – student and teacher, J and L, no, monsters – some stones you throw over your shoulder and are still waiting to hear them hit ground.
*
Wanting to talk more with L, you bring up getting sundaes which is your way of coping with stress in high school, that and a good yank. You say this to L (not the good yank bit) after a school function where you played classical guitar for a fashion show, plucked etudes and waltzes as young bodies modeled clothes. Riding in L’s minivan, talking all the way to the T-heads, talking as you look over the bay. You tell L about how hard it is to live at home, all the arguing between you and your mother, your mother and her boyfriend, your aunt spelling out how you should hurry and move away for college. Because if you don’t you will go crazy. You don’t know when L started holding your hand, only are surprised to find it a bit rough the way she keeps kneading into your skin with her thumb as you repeat what your aunt said: Si yo estuviera en tu lugar, ya me habría puesto una pistola en la cabeza. L asks for the Spanish, so you translate roughly: If I were you, I would’ve placed a gun to my head long ago.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, you spend a class field trip to San Antonio taking photos of L in her sunglasses. From the outside, you wonder if this was charming at first: white teacher and brown student taking turns posing for photos. From the outside, you realize you didn’t take turns, it was L in a pose, in a smile; L in her shades (you think: who wears sunglasses all the time – you can’t tell a thing they’re feeling). From the outside, you dread going back to where you live, to being seventeen, and so inarticulate you have to write a note to your mother asking her not to bring another man into the house, worried he will beat her like the others. To have read her the note and had her response simply be: Yo mando; voy hacer lo que quiero. Or as you broke it down for L: I’m in charge, I’ll do what I want. There’s one photo in particular that always comes to mind: L with her leg up on a bench, as if she’s claiming it. You see this only later, after the colors develop.
*
Want to hear more after your history teacher tells the class your high school was built as an answer to desegregation, namely to keep the Mexicans out of the white side of town. None of us know what to do with this new information. This teacher, who for a month has been suffering from an irritation in her eye and wears an eye patch, goes on to say this is why a city official deems your school unfit for anything other than training auto mechanics and nurses, that it has produced no artists or writers of any value. This teacher, white, can only see half the classroom, only half of the brown faces in the room, and perhaps does not see your hand writing down: Let’s try to see what she sees.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L jokes she hated you when the semester started, thought you another ego-driven youngster who would put no effort into English.
*
Want to never meet L’s daughters, worried you’ll end in a Greek tragedy.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L begins to read aloud an ee Cummings poem:
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
and you feel singled out—
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
you feel your eyes water, feel your skin itch
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
as the other students shift in their seats—
may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
you do not know what they might know
may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she
or why exactly she leans with one hand on your desk
but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
her face away from yours, you cannot see what the class sees
(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
only feel the hum of her voice down her arm, her hand an inch or two (or less) from yours.
(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)
*
Wanting a girl from another school, you meet up with her on a field trip for the gifted and talented. You find out her birthday; she’s a Sagittarius. You write a poem about her for a contest. You win with your poem about a woman born in December finding roses in winter, smile at the girl: I know we just met but – she corrects your mistake; she was born in November. L’s also a Sagittarius.
*
Wanting touch, a friend in biology class asks you for massages every afternoon during film reels about photosynthesis, life’s chemical foundations, and the ins and outs of a eukaryotic cell, lets you rub her shoulders and neck, down her back at times, down the front of her neck, fingers digging below the clavicle, only a moan now and then, a shift; in a fever, you do not want to know how far she will let you go.
*
Wanting to make clear you-don’t-know-what, your mother turns to you one summer afternoon and says: Cuidado con esa señora. You later flip it: Be careful with that woman—but know the English has nothing of the age implied in the Spanish.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L comes to an open mic with her husband and they both watch you read a poem about a blue dress she wore once for you.
*
Want to never be the old boyfriend L rants about as she speeds down Ocean Drive: also a writer, close to her age, he missed his mother’s funeral because he was working on a novel – she tells you all this now, jabbing her finger in the air: That better be a great fucking chapter!
*
Want to make sure each word in a letter you write by hand is clear, you bear down, retrace words, at times piercing the paper. Later, L exhales as she says: I love how you darken certain words, going over them again and again.
*
Wants to be remembered, so L gifts an anthology of poems to you with the words, For the man who loves my ‘pilgrim soul’ inscribed on the first page. Later, you find the Yeats poem these words come from, and write it out by hand, memorize it:
…How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face…
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L says: I have great breasts, just you wait!
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L smiles as you get into the passenger seat, laughs as she tells you that as she walked out the door her husband had said, straight out: Don’t sleep with J!
*
Wanting you, L turns down a street lined with palm trees, takes her right hand off the wheel, waves it in the air as she says she couldn’t believe God had sent you to her in the first place, and a virgin – she couldn’t pass it up.
*
Want to strike all the right notes sitting in front of your guitar teacher’s desk, you play a new piece for him, and he barks out: Steady your hands! You play like a virgin!
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, you are spending most of prom writing into your notebook what you think are poems. You used to rewrite the lyrics to songs on the radio with your own words, but never thought those poems. Tonight you write about auburn hair and sunlight, about beauty and love and darkness, about stars and trees, using phrases like: the trees are skeleton calliopes. Later, you will read from these pages for L and she will hold her breath. Later, you will read from these pages for your psychology teacher and she will say: Gee, kid, you’ve got some issues.
*
the seven sins of want: awareness
Wanting no one to see your gut, you hide under oversized T shirts. Even at the beach, you wear the wet, heavy fabric like a flag of shame. You hear your cousins laugh, your aunts saying: Mira, and you yourself look down sometimes at the fabric shaped to the folds of your teenage body. Llantas, your mother calls them, tires made of brown skin, brown flab doubled on itself. You know you could stop keeping candy bars hidden in your room, know you will stop one day, but not today, not after hearing laughter. You will open the drawer and find them, the Snickers brown wrappers bright as the wet skin you keep hidden, each bar as wide as a fold you blame yourself, your mouth, your body for, a fold you are sure is family, your mother as she wraps a black trash bag around her torso, then begins pedaling on the exercise bike in the living room, the plastic breaking with light and dark as she turns to you and says: Tenemos que enflacar—We must thin ourselves down.
*
Wanting to look big and play the part, you ask her to drop you off in front of the hotel so you can run in and pay for the room; L tells you to crank the A/C, that’s all she cares about. Later, you’ll remember driving to the hotel together meant driving past the projects where your family first lived, the side of Corpus you could afford then, the side of Corpus known around the city in jokes and warnings. You won’t be you and I won’t be me, L said.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L undoes the buttons of her dress slowly, pats your chest, asks you to: Slow down, enjoy this as I do.
*
Wanting you-don’t-know-what, L whispers that you are seventeen, yes, but soon you’ll be eighteen, and eighteen goes on and has romances, and eighteen goes on and wears condoms (not like this first time), and eighteen tells her all about the world you go and see, but eighteen doesn’t talk about this, yes?
*
Want to remember the feeling of you and L’s bodies together as you wait afterwards outside the hotel for a friend to pick you up, you begin to think the sun a symbol of unbuttoning a shirt, of hair being let down, of wanting to talk about a secret, and at the same time wanting to keep it a lousy, fucking secret.
*
Want to remember every word spoken, every gesture, but you keep coming back to L whispering: Keep this to yourself, then gripping your hand so hard there is no room for you to speak up.