Assistant Editor Taylor Byas: JD Debris’s poem “[those ‘mexicans for golovkin’ shirts]” is a cultural flashback, a cinematic pan over the past. The speaker of this poem is both voiceover and musical soundtrack at once, singing us through their experience of making and selling T-shirts outside of New York’s Madison Square Garden. And everything on the page is in technicolor, the colors so crisp, the sounds so sharp and clear. Even if the shirts were “a bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg,” Debris’ vision is anything but.
To hear JD read his poem, click below:
[those ‘mexicans for golovkin’ shirts]
from Chalino Sánchez: A Sequence
A bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg.
Red screen print on polycotton blends
fallen off the back of a truck.
Juan & I hawked seven boxes
outside Madison Square Garden
the night Gennadiy Golovkin
knocked out David Lemieux.
Some photos could outlive Lascaux’s
charcoal, oxide, & ocher: Chalino
at the table with the cocked Tejana,
shirt unbuttoned, loading the Glock.
Some rando photoshopped the Kazakh
killer Golovkin’s goofy grin onto
our narco-icon. We caught on pronto,
printed up a ream, sold Sánchez’s silhouette
the same way he once sold cassettes,
on the street. Then counted twenties
on the almost-empty Queensbound E,
where, every morning, an accordion
player wanders car to car & keens.
JD Debris writes poems, songs, and prose. He held the Goldwater Fellowship at NYU from 2018–20, where he completed his MFA. In 2020 his work was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for Ploughshares‘s Emerging Writers Prize, and he was named to Narrative‘s 30 Below 30 list. His releases include the chapbook Sparring (Salem State University Press, 2018) and the music albums Black Market Organs (Simple Truth Records, 2017) and JD Debris Murder Club (forthcoming).
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