Human Instamatic
after Martin Wong
Roach motel in cinders.Electromagnetic hand jive. Interregnum of Alphabet City. Dilapidated voices from 1981 rescinded. Secret Caribe Suzuki walk. Brick-hearted papichulos dressed for anabasis. Handball court liturgies. Little Ivan of the Aztec jungle prays before drowning in concrete.Baked curbsides incite the butcher to adorn his quinceañera gown, kiss a wireman before sweaty tenements perfumed in pitorro. Expired hydrants mimic Cepheus, wait to berezoned. Boxedin. Boxed up.Boxed out. Hopscotch dereliction among the scree. Morir de angustia. Community garden pig roast. Courtroom shocker. He's got wrecking-ball lungs, hickory smoked ribs belting bachata for nine weeksand counting. A pockmarked marquee citing Ephesians. Mystery sludge crawls, congeals into a pond. It's no place to raze, to raise a raza, she raps. Desespera siempre, negrito, siempre desaparecidos. Gas mask revelation, paper lamps bequeathed to repo lots.Benevolent diss associations. Insolent departures from blue-faced angels named Angel who dawdle in the basement with botanica candles. Silence indicted, offered a plea deal. But the sitter is a despot vowing Cocotazos para todos!What I saw waswhat I meant waswhat was was. Southbound, a roving vigil for the sundered. Northbound, an impaired fleet of unemployed demagogues recolonizing the poolhall. The Rubble Kings resurrected as testimoniosstricken from public record.
Feature Date
- August 19, 2020
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Brian Teare
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“Human Instamatic” from TERTULIA by Vincent Toro
Copyright © 2020 by Vincent Toro.
Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, director, and educator. He is the author of STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. (Ahsahta Press) and Tertulia (Penguin Random House). Vincent has been awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize. He is also winner of the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, and is a former Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Vincent’s work has been published in dozens of magazines and journals, including Washington Square, BOAAT, Rattle, Vinyl, The Acentos Review, The Buenos Aires Review, Chiricú Journal of Latino/a Literatures, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Vincent is director of the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a professor of English at Bronx Community College, a Dodge Foundation poet, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.
“Toro’s poetry is exuberant and often comic, celebrating Latinx identity and culture in America even as it flags injustice and inequality at every turn.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Toro’s book successfully captures [the tertulia] spirit; it arrives with different shades and sections, unified by his risks (and successes) with poetic language . . . [E]xtreme focus and concision creates new visions . . . Awareness and vulnerability in this collection are complemented by empathy.”
—The Millions
“Icepick-perceptive . . . A rich, ambitious, and inventive observation of Latinx life in America.”
—Library Journal (starred)
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