Latinxfuturist Poems
- Latinxfuturist Poems
DREAMcatcher
Illegal my eyes. Iris of unfertilizedplateaus. Unforgiven for surginginto a dialect with no global marketvalue. Illegal my argot. I cannotjust wade out in neutral lakes. I cannotsay. Cannot evade the plexus that marksme contraband. When I seed aboveores you crave you illegal me, forge deeds,uproot me, hire me to manage the waste,illegal my soles when your arsons dragme to your doorstep. Illegal my faith.Broadcast me an illegal substance. Refuseme lodging if I refuse to be free labor.Allege me vermin, toxin, zombify allkin who return enraged by your tombopolis.Illegal my relics, confiscate my liver. Noweven my scars must be registered. Illegalmy pyres enkindled by your rotepandemics. Illegal the bronze of my cutis.If I split walnuts with the neighborssomehow it’s lascivious. Illegal myparchments, my pons, my corybantictime signatures. Only my silenceis welcome. Only my silence is suspect. [End Page 155]
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 Dilapidated voices from 1981 rescinded.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. The brick heartedextinction dressed in suede. Handball court liturgies. Little Ivan of the Aztec jungle prays before drowning in concrete.The butcher barrel slapped, foments the foremen to kiss before perspiring slums adorned in the drag of bathtub gin. Avenues of mopped constellationsboxed in,boxed over,boxed out. Infanticide among the scree. [End Page 156]
Morir de angustia. Slump and throttle. Courtroom shocker, he’s got wrecking balls for lungs, hickory smoked.This life utterly a chain link of indelible arsons, a sweet mad marquee dimmed, diced in Wurlitzer blood. Congeals into a pond, it’s no place to raze, to raise a raza.Cupcake annunciations padlocked,soapdished, panned out across Cepheus. Desespera siempre, negrito, siempre desaparecidos. Gas mask revelation, paper lamps bequeathed in tow away zones.Benevolent diss associations. Insolent departures from blue faced angels named Angel, who prattle with pipes in the basement. Implicated by the artifice of silence. The sitter is a blabbermouthed coconut. Cocotazos para todos! [End Page 157]
What I saw waswhat I meant waswhat was was
a voluptuous parade of laminated
totems to the south. To the north,
an impaired phalanx
of demure demagogues
recolonizing the pool
hall.
The rubble kings resurrected as testimoniosstricken from public record. [End Page 158]
Cinephrastic: Sleep Dealer
Dry, this mesa. What is potable siphoned by drone shepherds warding these hinter- lands. Their lenses sniff me hyperpoaching company waves. Delete my source code, spurring migration via system integration. My rural gone obsolete. Bail to become
dermal conduit. Repurposed by coyote tech. Ahora soyprosthetic stoop labor. Discarnate extremities uprooting
cassava via live stream. The innovation this demesne of capital gain has sought: an interface that unBrowns the goods. Each hour spent betahitched to network of cyber-maquilas surges my amaurosis. Neural bandwidth atrophies when chains
go asomatous. Mi memoria outsourced to depletedsectors, embezzled and greased to snooze pilferers.
Nodehunted. Ramsacked. My narco- processors watt sapped, until Luz hemo- hacks wetware syncretism. Until meta- carpal of drone shepherds hits ctrl-alt- del. Hops mode and margin. Excises ill logic gate that robohews granjero
from extranjero. Inducing bit torrent deluge of ancientrain to el campo. The fileswarm englutting me shunted. [End Page 159]
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor from the New York area. His debut collection of poetry, Stereo. Island. Mosaic., was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and a poem from the collection won The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Award.
