Vertebrae

"of those assembled here / ... / this concerns whatever we / are saprotrophic / nuestras pieles / dicen casi todo / a glitch exceeding" begins Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz's vertebrae, a translingual poetic diptych written in the aftermath of explosive colonial contact, from within capitalism's cold twilight calculations. In polyrhyme, wisecrack, snarl, and epitaph, Sarmiento Cruz performs an "uncoupling ceremony," reminding us that "capital / will eventually / pass with or without us." Here is a vertiginous, locked-in collection that slips between tongues ("tragedia / come at me") like circuits in the machine, where a city "consuming fifty two cows daily" must meet visions of bison lining the horizon. Sarmiento Cruz reorients us to freefall and "the comfort of the postapocalyptic posibilidades" that something of us (human, animal, floral, fungal) will survive inside whatever comes next.