Latino/a Roundtable Poets
Roberto Tejada
Anvil and Bellows
In all manners Mister Tourniquet intoned attention turning to my treatment Many times ignored Many times identical to the carbonate castle Many times in tribal paint Unbridled scuttlebutt stargaze releasing children Palsied in germinal burst
Surface made of metal Missus Skeleton Key: it's a cruel copy Tantamount to the emotion precinct Tantamount to the other story imprint To the opposite self complete with pigment, actually Archaic catalog of chattel and usufruct Whose characters include— Professor Blind-Eye-Turning Sister Bulletproof Jacket Reverend Dead Man's Gully Mister Secretary General of the Global Farm Security
Birth lines intersect here with the turnstile attorneys Whose testimony pictograms a timetable Into gossip and gainsay the evidence of animals So menaced by what surrounds These laws with mindful hand and fodder As to inaugurate the weightless stranger Brothering this imbursement With alleged methods that stain and stoke That ever more extricate our ancestor From wonders one and all The End
Then the final credits run with life forms And we stray either from intimacy Or the accident part Emerges between miniature Movement and application Austerity and surface Superposition and plane Oh river palms and clock face Stairwell and flagstone Aspect of a method Verily over Landscape With Gazebo adding Bethlehem rose Or clump green Wax-warm layers of synthetic skin, Meat-muddled anniversary Involuntary bromide book bound to inlay the marriage of word paste And tooth pull Domina, this minion font and frontage Over putty in pages Reproduced by Lower quadrant anvil Vertical bellows and antelope In upward red Quick quick! the syllables to stagger The enumerated forethought As when cobalt woodwinds issue silver pearls
"Anvil and Bellows" was previously published
in LRL5 (2010.)
* * *
Roberto Tejada (Los Angeles, 1964) is the author of several poetry
collections, including Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006) and
Exposition Park (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded
and continues to co-edit the journal Mandorla: New Writing from
the Americas. He is, as well, the author of art histories that include,
most recently, National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image
Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Celia
Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino,
and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The
Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text.
