PROMESA (HR 4900)
Song to ward off venture capitalists.
The tinto shipped
from our ancestors in Galicia
flirts unabashedly with giggling hens
on the veranda. Tio Frank
is praying to his pipe, the smoke
cradles his bajo sexto
as he croons, conjuring the flota
that dislocated us from the last
century. Junior rocks the ricochet
like a sorcerer of Brownian
motion. He is a garrison perched
across the ping pong table
like an eight limbed
colossus. In the kitchen cards
are slapped like sinvergüenzas
round after round in an endless
game of Texas Hold ‘Em that holds
the cousins hostage. The winner
is never the sucker
with the ace, the winner
is he who talks shit with Fidel’s
fuerza bruta, an eight hour
fusillade of slick digs and relentless
boasts. Beside them abuelita
plays Zatoichi with the lechon
asado, ropa vieja is swallowed
by vagrant cangrejo
and bored nieces running
on fumes from chasing
the dog around the chicken coops.
This party was supposed to evanesce
long before sun up, but the coquito
is still spilling, the tias
still stalking the counter-
rhythms of the timbale like Bolivar
across the Andes. The road
at the end of the driveway is shrapnel,
the privatized water too steep
for our pockets, but we got tariffs
on this tanned euphoria
so no vulture
funds can raid and strip
the assets from our
digames, our ‘chachos, our
oyes, our claros, our
‘manos, our oites, our carajos,
our negritos, our vayas,
our banditos,
our pa que tu lo sepas!
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Vincent Toro is the author or STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC., which was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He is a two time Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. Vincent teaches English at Bronx Community College, is poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, is writing liaison for Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.
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