REN KOPPEL TORRES
Reason
One of these days I’ll paint your portrait in my epilogue,
an untrained hand unearthing your humanity.
You: fleshy, healthy, corporeal— never nourished.
Hair like nopales, despite your efforts and the gel,
that you adore in loud silence, since you still go on
pretending you don’t subsist on the theatrical.
Sandy skin and glassy eyes, you look like the desert you live in.
You’re cruel sometimes and you would know this
if you allowed yourself to pause and
think every so often, but you haven’t faltered yet.
It is my purpose in life to immortalize your fall.
My only desire: to remember how beautiful you might have been
if you’d even once cried in front of somebody else.
So humor me.
Pose in front of my canvas as I work, and consider the advice
of someone else patched from nonentity.
I was written into existence, created a minor character in a sci-fi book who was mentioned
by name only once. In canon, I worked in a flower shop,
and my one spoken line was: “Thank you.”
I am not always so grateful. I choose to be more.
My advice: Stop entertaining the idea that rationality will save you.
You were orphaned by specificity, but you were Born from an ideal.
You forget that your life was peeled up from the edges of
a child’s scribbled drawing,
and I hold nothing but high standards for
someone shaped like the absurd.
Ren Koppel Torres is a 17-year-old Jewish-Mexican-American artist living in Austin, Texas. Ren is the founder and editor of the Latino arts magazine Alebrijes Review. Ren is passionate about philosophy, photography, rock music, and promoting child literacy. Website: KoppelTorres.com. Twitter: @KoppelTorres.