ISSUE 68 

The poem series, “The Devil’s Workshop,” is a meditation on my time spent in 1997 on Clinton and Stanton Street in NYC. It was written in sobriety as an attempt to make beauty from the ugliness of a crack pipe and syringe. Street artist Richard Hambleton and I would often comment on the grace of the soft-white “full-billow” of smoke released from a glass-pipe, or the image of a “perfect stream of blood,” when the needle registers in a vein. In the poem, I show the slow mosaic elegance of desperation, brokenness, and demonic demise. It is something like a flat-lining person throw-smashing a glass jar of red paint against a brick wall. The addict relishes in the violent, falling image of the broken glass and paint like a “running red fox.” These meditations worked as ritual and ceremony, unlocking the doors of my traumatic past to heal the dark rooms of anger, resentment, and shame. The video was filmed at the 21c Museum Hotel, in Kansas City, MO.

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Xavier Cavazos is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Currently, Cavazos is a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest and teaches in the Professional and Creative Writing Program at Central Washington University, where he also directs the Liberal Studies Program.