No wonder I like fish.
Not the food as in pescado,
but the life that swims
like a question
mark in the body
with its body. That’s how
we got fishy as questionable—
fish know how to doubt
how to go on with reason and
dance upstream. It takes
bones and instinct to have a journey.
The flesh is where it’s all felt,
the gills are where it’s questioned.
Fish as onomatopoeia for gliding (how
to say it best to feel it from bones to
flesh and know you have a body).
Fish has to include the water
being in communion.
Being fish.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 3.
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, Zócalo: Public Square, MAYDAY, Figure 1, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, SRPR, 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), long-listed 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.
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