Vincent Toro

Sonicphrastic: El Grito (Jorge Lopez Ruiz, 1967)

Sometimes she rises up from the sternum of a child whose
father became an apparition. Her octave, a brand 
on the shoulder swelling from clinging onto a ledge
of grief that cackles in the school courtyard. She drapes
over the irises of a florist perched before

the pink house in a squealing lake, reciting the names
of lovers plucked from San Telmo alleys
during a broker’s boozy lunch hour. Sometimes
he appears courteous and delicate, a drizzle
of snares framing an unearthed torch song. Sweet

as he may sound, he is a beckoning, an S.O.S. warbled
from a drowning sloop. She troubles
the morning’s inhibitions with her tenebrous demands
that today at least there will be no professors
force fed to the already bloated sharks. On these

days she is an indignant fist. He might convince you
he’s a thrush but he is a flag being unspooled
in a nagging liver, flown at half-mast to honor
indignities only family has the gall to inscribe.
So let her blaze uptempo uprock, a gutbucket wail,

a wall of electronic sobs swallowing Broadway,
remixed into a praise song for the vexed.
He can’t help but blare refusals. Sometimes, though
he arrives as an ornery joy holding the court
in contempt. Or she barges in with a roar that any lion

would covet. Now and again he materializes 
as a whisper woven into linens for tired
houseguests who have come a long way to bring
news from the homeland. During quarter
moons she cascades across entire continents,

gets stapled to toppling signposts and yawls 
for the new neighbors who only moved
in to blight the precinct with their high end
candle store. Sometimes he sprouts
as a microbe, slipping into nostrils to foment

a shareholder’s influenza. Brash, she tussles
and shreds on Rickenbackers to inject
a working-class kid from the Westside
wielding an itch to scratch the paint
off the walls with a DGC chord that gifts

him the will to report to work tomorrow.
El Grito, you see, she’s an amulet.
He’s a wool sweater. They’re a spaceship,
a nuclear kiss. He’s the last call.
She’s the first responder, the third strike. 

He’s the four-count, the zero hour. They’re
the shush in the library, the clapback
in the club. They’re the bridge, the spokes,
the low brow hoot and high tide that
returns subsides returns subsides returns 

The Pothole

It began as a crevice on Avenue B. Snow and oil swelled it. The wound went untended. The crew paid to fill it ran off with the advance after boosting equipment from the company van. Soon the fissure became an abscess deep enough to fit a pedestrian of slightly below average height and weight. Some neighbors tossed plywood over it hoping to conceal this emptiness, but with no warning and no foresight as to how much weight the slats could hold, an alpaca and two terriers fell in, further expanding the pothole’s circumference, until it stretched halfway across the intersection. Now smart cars and citizens diverted by streams of messages on their phones were being swallowed by this cavity. A community action team decided to plug the chasm with secondhand bureaus, orange cones, a wurlitzer, and stacks of elementary school text books that were deliberately published with factual inaccuracies. None of this abated the crack’s expansion. This aperture persisted in ensnaring unsuspecting tourists and naval officers on shore leave.  Eventually the city council voted to seal it up with six hundred and eighty thousand pennies, which the depression promptly gulped down with what can only be interpreted as a personified glee. The gape flowered across the city limits and into the pampas, engulfing the parillas and viceroys, the research facilities and alternate histories, remote controls and leather saddles, dialectical systems and personal hygiene product manufacturing agencies. As a last attempt to stave off more casualties, networks tried to wish away the abyss by repeating to the cameras that the pit is just a hoax invented by fame seekers. In retaliation, cults were initiated to prove that not only does the void exist, but that it is, in fact, a deity. They tried to prove this by hurling themselves en masse into the depression on the nineteenth of August. On the twentieth of August we all agreed to not talk about what happened on the nineteenth, and to convince ourselves it never happened we began to harmonize ourselves with the chasm, hanging up family photos on its crags, and settling at the bottom. Today we all live inside this lacuna, where we have installed a security system and an underground swimming pool. After dinner each night we project movies onto the dimmest craters and waiting for public works to repair the pit inside our gorge.

Vincent Toro is a Boricua poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia (Penguin Random House, 2020) and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta, 2016), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and has been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. His third poetry book, HIVESTRUCK, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2024.