I want to tell a story, follow it through
without knowing beforehand how
mine ends.
Everything ends, dwindles, or begins.
To tell a story even if I can’t tell some words
apart, like harvest and sow, like sew and torn.
The hope uncertainty yields.
A word as verb, noun, and order, but how
it rips me to bits when torn
is final.
The finale unravels the accumulation
of fins—fish or plurals—blends
of a full stop.
Tongues travel to the same place
with different senses.
How many different ways can I say I
don’t want to be an astronaut?
The switch from stars to protagonists,
the grounding of the story through my mouth
and fingers: rewriting the bones
that start and end but are always
reaching towards
Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including the chapbooks Between Gone and Leaving—Home (dancing girl press, 2023) and Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254, 2022). Her poems and translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in many journals such as Asymptote, Figure 1, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, SRPR, Arsenic Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Timber, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Claus and the Scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co•im•press, 2022), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award in Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), which was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Cesarco Eglin is the publisher of Veliz Books and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown. More at lauracesarcoeglin.com