I’ve no basis for discerning what’s verse and what’s poetry other than whether it jostles a personal needle. I compare a poetry moment (loosely) to another apex moment — that of collapsing into a sexual partner, wrapped in appendages and received. The comparison may be overheated, but what strikes me as important is that the text and I are intertwined. Its words have thrust us into close communion. I, a reader, want to be as nuclear to the poetry moment as the writer. They have sought me, and I them. There’s no need asserting that the poem which has induced me into vital congress with itself ought to be important to others having their own affair with verse. When a text that jumps my needle jumps yours, however, we’ve found common ground — something to crow about.

Life is so done and gone, so irretrievable when it leaves the body, so fucked. Perennial violent death is priced so religiously into human affairs that we’re scabbed over from it, psychically calloused by it, inured to it; nonetheless, a single instance concentrated and conveyed through artifice can still hurt like hell. Antonio López’s poem paints the tragedy of a young life snuffed out. Its demotic tone, liturgical parody and evocation of urban desert build to a close whose unruly full stop is at perfect pitch, piercing with dolor and incredulity.

[…]
Our altar, that art in EPA, hallow be thy pain, thy henny, thy Don Julio will be poured in dirt as it is in 7-Eleven, give us this day our daily Takis, our westside, our good morning, our good night, our boy back, please, his dreams, his age, 15, his name I pray, Inty, my God, you were hardly. A man.
(Antonio López, “Our Lady of the Westside,” in Poetry, December 2023)

Amen.

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