LAURA CESARCO EGLIN
July 8th
The house is empty except for July 8th. Not sure what year. The dream
didn’t hold that as relevant. The day started at 4 a.m. even if at 7 a.m. I
didn’t know it yet. Much later I try to go back to those first three hours; let
my tongue rest instead of pushing my teeth. Let my teeth bite into that
emptiness. 4 a.m.’s texture is similar to the pages of the book I was holding
while scanning them. It’s just as well that my fingers are there now, on every
one of the 65 pages. Holding as an act of love. Even on July 8th, together
with July 8th, of that year, of every year. Empty is no longer.
Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Reborn in Ink, translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval (The Word Works, 2019), Calling Water by Its Name, translated by Scott Spanbauer (Mouthfeel Press, 2016), and Sastrería (Yaugurú, 2011). She has also published three chapbooks: Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020), Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune, 2015) and Tailor Shop: Threads, co-translated with Teresa Williams (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her poems, as well as her translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in a variety of journals, including Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, Spoon River Poetry Review, Arsenic Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Blood Orange Review, Timber, Pretty Owl Poetry, Pilgrimage, Periódico de Poesía, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She co-translated from the Portuñol Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books, 2020). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown.
