JACOB SHORES-ARGUELLO

Costa Rican Walking Tree


The squat palm is a mess of thin

root-like branches, a thousand legs

looking for sun. It leans towards

the selva's edge, fumbling for the

ocean’s empty promise of light.

The biologist tells the tourists that it

has walked ten meters in twenty years.

Later, in the heat of her tent, I ask

if it's true, can a tree really escape

from its gloom-roofed life?

She smiles and says it’s just a story

that tour guides and witches tell––

a balm for people who’ve walked

too far in the jungle’s unexpected dark.


205  The Paris-American

Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet, fiction writer, and translator. He is the author of  In The Absence of Clocks, which was awarded the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Competition, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa. Jacob is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, the Dzanc Books ILP International Literature Award, The Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown, the Djerassi Resident Artist’s Fellowship, and the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox, MA. His second manuscript Paraíso has been selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize and will be coming out in 2017. His work appears in The New Yorker, Guernica, and The Journal.

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  Next week's poet:
  
  Luisa Muradyan Tannahill