homo faber
by Éric Morales-Franceschini
Let’s be real, there’s no market for working class
phenomenology, it’ll have to be “ghetto lit,” because
doesn’t it always come back to the commodity fetish;
so let’s put it this way: we lived just south of
“the dump” and east of a sewage plant; and, yeah,
I hated the one, but somewhat perversely loved
the other, which I came to know through all those
“dump runs” with my tíos; and, true enough
the offloading of junk was satisfying, but
the real draw was the foraging—its trappings
like a Dalí painting, everything melting in that
Florida sun and everything surreal: all this free stuff
in a world where everything has a price; and I’d
watch as my tíos became these anti-capitalist
anti-heroes, unwittingly at odds with this pedagogy
in disposability; and it was holy, dare I say, because
they’d resurrect, and by that I don’t just mean the
thing in itself, but the worker in himself becoming
maker and seller of things, useful things, things for
other workers with worker needs; and so
therein stood the emergence of a new market, or at
least the possibility thereof—no stocks, no bonds,
no ceos: only the artistry of these artisans, raging
against all this stench.
phenomenology, it’ll have to be “ghetto lit,” because
doesn’t it always come back to the commodity fetish;
so let’s put it this way: we lived just south of
“the dump” and east of a sewage plant; and, yeah,
I hated the one, but somewhat perversely loved
the other, which I came to know through all those
“dump runs” with my tíos; and, true enough
the offloading of junk was satisfying, but
the real draw was the foraging—its trappings
like a Dalí painting, everything melting in that
Florida sun and everything surreal: all this free stuff
in a world where everything has a price; and I’d
watch as my tíos became these anti-capitalist
anti-heroes, unwittingly at odds with this pedagogy
in disposability; and it was holy, dare I say, because
they’d resurrect, and by that I don’t just mean the
thing in itself, but the worker in himself becoming
maker and seller of things, useful things, things for
other workers with worker needs; and so
therein stood the emergence of a new market, or at
least the possibility thereof—no stocks, no bonds,
no ceos: only the artistry of these artisans, raging
against all this stench.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is former construction worker, US Army veteran, and community college grad who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Autopsy of a Fall, winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Award, and The Epic of Cuba Libre: the mambí, mythopoetics, and liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022). His poetry and reviews have appeared in Moko, Kweli, Acentos Review, Newfound, Boston Review, and elsewhere.