Tommy Pico

cantfindit

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a poet, podcaster, and tv writer. He is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, Feed, and myriad keen tweets. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcasts Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen!, is poetry editor at Catapult Magazine, writes on the TV shows Reservation Dogs and Resident Alien, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. Source

Excerpt from "Nature Poem"

When a star dies, it becomes any number of things

like a black hole, or a documentary.

 

The early universe of our skin was remarkably smooth

now I stand in a rapidly dampening Christina Aguilera tee

 

The first stars were born of a gravity, my ancestors—

our sky is really the only thing same for me as it was for them,

which is a pretty stellar inheritance

 

I don’t know how they made sense of that swell, how they survived long enough to make me, and am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally

 

but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of meaning

isn’t ultimately that different from a poem

So I’ve started reading the stars

 

Nothing is possible until it happens, like digesting sulfur instead of sunlight

or friends with benefits

 

Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods

but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice

of humanity.

 

I look up at the poem, all of them up there in the hot sky and fall

into the water, a stone

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Faith & Hope

Humor & Satire

Intersectionality & Culture

Memory & The Past

Nature

Pop Culture

Literary Devices:

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Internal Rhyme

A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.

Irony

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Juxtaposition

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic