I am alone but for this veinsplitting the earth openand we are silent, the stream and Ifar away from our mouths. The streamfolds over itself, my handspeculating under the surface.The stippled faces of oriolessail by slowly, their dark wings workinghard as tired men pulling oarsin a landscape painting, their lanternchests dotting a modest patternacross the sky, over this brooka mile from your house—from youwho are alone but for your sonsand your sons’ refusal to recognizeyou cloaked under a sadness,the color of whose cloth is mutedas these late-afternoon birds.The stream sluices crawdadsand stones, carefully takes its bendlike a tongue spackled with canker sores.I still expect it to speak. I’ve cometo listen to this slowunfurling, hoping I’ll fallasleep as it turns like a lullabya child promises he will strainto hear, to memorize. I make senseof smudged pastoral visions.Gone, the birds long gone.Palms, I cup water with bent palms.
Someone Is the Water
Feature Date
- January 12, 2025
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Excerpted from The Park at the Edge of the Country: Poems, published by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press.

Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and his poems have recently appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. His debut collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country, won the 2023 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Prize and is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books in February 2025.
“The lushness of the language, the precision of the images, the humor, the deft and digressive narratives—these poems are so beautiful. But I am most moved by and keep going back to the wrenching, complicated, grown-ass poems about fathers, and about fathers and sons: by how patient Araujo is in those poems, how he lets them answer to music, and love.”
—Ross Gay
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