America

"America" is a poem born of Marco's love for the country he came to in August of 1985. (Note: this may or may not be the exact year or month of Marco's immigration to the United States. Univore has made a point to ask him the next time they see him.) Each stanza is meant to evoke a deliberately paradoxical reverence for the New World. This is especially the case in such phrases as "sweetly rancid," which suggests something that, once consumed, is pleasant to taste but could quickly prove poisonous. Likewise, the metaphor of "lakes...made of fake diamonds" brings to mind a shiny jewel of a no value because it is counterfeit, as well as the bastardization of a body of water. To call America a "gentle hustler" is to suggest the insincerity of someone seeking to take advantage of the stereotypical immigrant's obliviousness, while the line "your teeth are white windows" means nothing intelligent. The metaphor of mountains arising like "a fist" is an allusion to a line found in the 1985 Carlos Fuentes novel, The Old Gringo, a fictionalization of the disappearance of writer Ambrose Bierce. It reads, "The mountains rose like worn, dark-skinned fists and the old man imagined the body of Mexico as a gigantic corpse with bones of silver, eyes of gold, flesh of stone and balls hard as
copper." Univore is fully aware of the presence of this line and of the work of Carlos Fuentes, so do not accuse it of anything underhanded.

While the accompanying video may bring comparisons to the famous clip from D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back of Bob Dylan in an alley dropping large note cards to the tune of his 1965 song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Univore has either no idea what you're talking about, as they have never seen this clip, or they have every expectation that, of the fourteen people who view the "America" video, half of them will be reminded of the Bob Dylan video.