Auto/Body

Auto/Body by Vickie Vértiz draws on the ostentatious beauty and raw power of Los Angeles car culture to interrogate constructions of gender and family dynamics within a Latinx context. Several maximalist poems appear spread across the page, great swathes of text with jags and stripes excised. “Desfile,” shaped like a shield with a diagonal banner of whitespace drawn across it, depicts East L.A.’s Mexican Independence Day Parade, a celebration of contradictions, in a blend of English and Spanish:

[…] Just how do they do that? Lift off

and wave at the same time? Ride and drive and le geste. Work and work and
drive and work at the same time. It is the ancient habit of my people—
electric rose acrylic and platinum pinstripes. We feast on tongue
and doubt. Imbeciles and invoices. Bones and myrrh.
Your sirènes and entrailles..

In “’70 Chevy El Camino,” the speaker is helping their father repair a car when their mother emerges from the house, and Apá lashes out: “Beat it, he tells Amá. She distracts him. Bothers like a fly / And when she walks away, he flings a word at her, a wrench, hard / into his toolbox.” The violence knocks the speaker down:

Tiny pebbles stick to my knees when I get up. And I think
That’s not how I want to be a man. I go inside to see if I can
    find
That tool Apá needs to fix our car
One that can help him make it run, be more beautiful
Instead of taking it apart

The speaker’s striving suggests a new direction for a popular Chicano pastime—one often defined by generational machismo—just as Vertiz shines lyrical high beams on a problematic past, in search of a different kind of muscular future. Still, the damage endures: “Some of us […] are still digging / our sisters / out of the rubble that is our fathers.”