Joshua Garcia
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
EPISTLE (MEMENTO MORI)
I am sometimes asked whether I call myself Latino.
I don’t speak the language, but I carry the name, a marker
which, for some, bends with the imagination (my dentist once called me José).
At a dinner, Carmen told me it won’t matter—
language, the malleability of perception—if they begin rounding
us into cages, which, of course, they have:
my name already set on a sugar skull somewhere, ready to be plucked
from a market shelf and handed to me, For you,
a memento mori, when I least expect it. Remember death,
present infinitive, unbound by time, moving in both directions
like heat from a candelabra, melting down its arms, rising
with its flames. You said, without emptiness, we cannot be,
and how holy this work is made out to be, the obliteration of self,
the bodies of ascetics sounding like the bells
of remote monasteries, a rumble heavenward, a tumble down
from high places, down serrated mountains, spilling
over hills and into valleys, plunging into ravines, licking every flower
with a tongue that knocks the sweetness out of property, out of idea.
Mark Strand wrote, You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves.
When I’m cold in the night, I reach.
MODELS WITH GODZILLA, ETC., 1990
after Philip Pearlstein
We were both born in the year of the horse, the year this was painted. Your eyes closed, mine staring beyond the plane. The past, its bareness, looms behind us and under our feet. The image came back but the body itself didn’t. Alienation amplified. Why bother with our grief? You sat on a stool and became another image collected in yearbooks and wallets and albums. No need to scrape together the remnants of an origin story chilling on the fridge. It’s very clearly just a list of things: rooster without its vane, wooden horse, plastic Godzilla, effigies and totems filed under etcetera, Navajo rug, a couple of bodies, a canvas, their carousel of shadows a matter of fact.
PHILIP PEARLSTEIN: FIGURES, PROPS, OBJECTS AND OTHER THINGS, 2024
after Philip Pearlstein
In the center of the room, his things. Wooden animals: geese, owl, zebra. Chairs of different sorts: deck, rattan, Eames. Rugs rolled up and listless. A play-sized red tractor. Sailboat. African drum. A woman goes on about the paintings. The integrity of it. Nothing is dashed about. There’s a lot of integrity. It has something of value. You know what I mean. Remember how, when we were younger, places had more significance? I would dream about returning to them, to some place I’d been and left, until I realized it’s all the same. They are abstract paintings. The figure is just another surface. This has to do with history. In another room a train ride away, fragmented portraits stained like glass. Faces come in and out of focus with the viewer’s proximity. And two unfinished portraits—I hope there’s an unfinished painting on my easel when I die—a meticulous grid exposed. Color—red, yellow, blue—refracting at the edges. Half of the canvas empty, naked.
Double Yolk extends gratitude to the Georgia Review, which first featured “Epistle (Memento Mori).”