Poetry
Some Brooklyn Northside Calaveritas
Suppose
pondering the cultural flock
some high noon
mock sacrificial
metallurgic offering—
to recuse
himself
arrivismo?
subjective
transference
“chosen”
Into a pit
pleasant paranoia
peaceful
feeling—
A break from
prolet-kampf
agonistics?
Blows up
in a materialite-speckled
face
Hungering
resist
two specialties
Content and its
porns
History not as something
you can live to tell your children
whispering
a tin heart—
a silver stomach—
(a steel-tempered—
into a chrome-plated—)
get youself
with someone else alloy
and forge
a borg-like
transference
a real estate
shake out
snatch up
a Lazarus come back from
graduate studies
sarcasmic
mock ecstatic
“please!”
(in polish)
prosz_
Acclimate?
frightening how fast
rousted
from The Southside
Boriquas
“fuckin’ bummed out, dude, just—”
chasing the creamer?
Silicon pilgrims conferring
(as ever)
On the runway
Bedford L-stop
prima donut
silver
diablo
vivora
adjective
blizzard
live / wack (off)
space conversion
beezulhubbub “nifty”guy
goofbar—
$4.50
a pint!
Kurva!
americanium
[that’s a real element by the way]
americanium
-plated
buns!
carbo’s—
into super
buggery insulin-spiking
conversion
a Iago-like
“wacky wit”
follows
an art-fart
come out
the mouth
poesy
an anarcho
-what-have-you-ist
slides into
dapper doubt—
after Nader
*
titanium birds chirping
(makes this an installation thing)
*
static
from the vibrant
lebensraum
lofts
*
we are chosen
*
transference
*
recused?
yes!
I am not of
said subcults of weird
displaced
(offset)
politics
*
(or am I?)
*
stress like that
*
squeezing out
alu-mi-ni-um
doodad
happiness
*
Trotsky: how’d you get here?
Me: how’d you get here?
Rodrigo Toscano’s three books include Partisans (O Books), The Disparities (Green Integer) and Platform (Atelos). His poetry has recently appeared in Cross Cultural Poetics, Kenning Audio Editions, and Cities of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from The United States and Brazil (Rattapallax). His work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Toscano lives in Brooklyn, and can be reached at [email protected]
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
21. 1954-1963, Los Angeles
By Raphael RubinsteinOCT 2022 | The Miraculous
In the mid-1950s, a youthful singer becomes a sensation in Los Angeles’s Mexican-American community for his energetic R&B performances. Switching effortlessly between English and Spanish, he appeals especially to young girls who flock to his performances at the El Monte Legion Stadium, a venue conveniently located just outside the LA city limits and thus not subject to the city’s restrictive racist regulations.
87. East Village, SoHo, Midtown
By Raphael RubinsteinFEB 2022 | The Miraculous
On November 5, 1969, a Saturday, an artist living at 340 East 13th Street, gets out of bed at 17 minutes after noon. Using rubber stamps, he notes this fact on a postcard that he mails to an art critic living at 138 Prince Street.
eight
By Roberto TejadaAPRIL 2022 | Poetry
Roberto Tejada is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham University Press, 2022); Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), a LatinX poetics on colonial settlement and cultural counter-conquest in art and literature of the Americas; as well as catalog essays in Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Obras (Art League Houston, 2020) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021). The poems here are from his forthcoming book Carbonate of Copper.
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show
By Zoë HopkinsJUL-AUG 2021 | ArtSeen
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show is an intimate gathering among old friends. Old and new works by each of the artists represented in the original exhibition flock together in a gorgeous reunion of living and passed on spirits.
