THE CHANGING OF COLORS: LOSS

It all amounts to finding that one thing that will hold us. Right now it’s the
turning of the leaves. Autumn is so smart. Change is necessary to survive
and go on. Conservation of energy: what to focus on, what to let go of. The
underlying vein is hurt. I am trying to not rhyme with pain. It’s not the way
it works—it’s more of a jagged situation. But it is about leaves, as in
someone leaves, as in someone left, as if there was a past tense for a leaf.
As if there was a past tense for grief. And yet, holding onto a leaf is so fitting
to define this vulnerability. Being.

Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, including Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020) and Reborn in Ink, translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval (The Word Works, 2019). 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.