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.