Spring Breakers (Dir. Harmony Korine, 2013)
Poetry is a place. The world puts you in your place. History dictates the pattern, dead as Saturn’s
rings. The world puts you in an orbit from which you can’t escape. An act of violence knocks you
out. A satellite tears free. A wall crumbles on a place where light sticks to skin like candy, money.
Where rainbows melt like petals, bikinis. Where we find who we are. Police lights flash. A girl cries.
The poem breaks down weeping in proximity to history, strange bodies. History crashes the party.
The poem’s purple skies threaten to roll up and reveal the exclusion they conceal. To expose the cut
that founds the site. That stands the light. That holds open the sky so we can step into the light of
who we are. A daughter. A good person. A poet.
Before Night Falls (Dir. Julian Schnabel, 2000)
A door opens on silence; a boy climbs through. The sun cracks an egg on your stupid head. What is
grace? Aloe shining on hips. A way of saying. Scent of aloe shredded on the table. Trees tattooed
with poems: Christmas. The ax. A poet is born; the world roars. Laughter wilts the butterflies. The
truth set me free to be nothing but this not unlike my family who being poor can be nothing but.
Not unlike the state that under capital can be nothing else. Not unlike the revolution that lives only
for itself. A revolution forgets its enemy, wages war at the level of the sign: grace in the hips, melted
gobs of aloe, beauty. Desire is a lyre but life reproaches death. The state reveals a man. Truth
unfolds a book, a sweetness of line. The subject of memory is the life.
Robert Fernandez is a poet, translator, and visual artist. He is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), as well as Pink Reef (2013) and We Are Pharaoh (2011), both published by Canarium Books. He co-translated Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” by Stéphane Mallarmé (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and his poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Huizache, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, Transition, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. www.robert-fernandez.com