In any case, by the time I realized I hadn’t spoken to my father
for many, many years, I was distracted. It was snowing
and I was stuck on page 157 of a biography of Casanova
who may have slept with multitudes, but lost
a fortune investing in a silk factory. I dreamed
about that story. I maintained my silence
in my cold room there, in Iowa, where industries
disappear the fingers and feet of its workers, a cohort
among which my dad might have been counted
had his travels led him farther north. Is there hazard pay
in the feeding of America? I have traveled so far from God,
my dad might have quoted if he kept diaries.
But who was I kidding? It was not the season of fathers.
It was the season of asylum. My uncle told me so.
While I sat there, in the gauzy twilight of snowy Iowa,
he traveled to the edge of Arizona
where he walked himself, hands in pockets, to border patrol.
When I was a child, he was also a child.
He held me down, poured wax on my neck
from hot devotional candles. I read in my room
when Juan Diego bailed on his meeting with the ghost
of Mary, she chided him for worrying
about his terminal uncle. Am I not here, she asked,
I, who is your sanctuary? I dreamed about that story
when the snow first began falling in Iowa. I was warmed
by the wax that tore like an arrow through my skin.
Copyright © 2025 by Austin Araujo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2026 by the Academy of American Poets.