The Last Torch Flower, 2023 Photo credit is Todd White. Courtesy the Artist Kenny Rivero and Charles Moffett, New York.

To Gabriel José, in memoriam

Tragedy lurks like a wounded lynx.
Like the sea, tragedy
knows no fatigue, there is no rest in its mysteries.
Wyckoff, a silence, our refuge of peace.
In summer, the beauty of flowers and meadows.
In winter, sad and snowy streets, mournful roofs,
the tidy patio in wasteful solitude.
The nighttime train whistle was a celebration
and yet now is a cry of pain.
It was a cold night, the stairwell awaited the sound of his arrival.
The world, for him, so small, so strange,
his love sought to save it with a gesture of her lips.
A book about Buddha on his nightstand,
poems about the sea,
scattered photos with the school tribe,
the unfathomable depths of life in a handful of words.
Everything within him serene, his face a flame.
His time with us is eternalized by his embraces.
The torments of life deeply tired him,
so sudden, so early the defeat of his days.
He had the helplessness and sleep of angels.
I pray to heaven, may the loving path of his feet
and his gaze never tire.

José Mármol
José Mármol is one of the most reknowed poets from the Dominican Republic. He was born in Santo Domingo and recieved his Doctor in Philosophy from the University of the Basque Country. He has published books of poetry, literary and philosophical essays, and volumes of aphorisms. He has won numerous awards including the Casa de América Prize for American Poetry, Spain; National Prize for Literature, among others.

Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of 10 award winning books, translated into over 15 languages, including Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Handal is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Africa Institute, and is the winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among others. She is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University-AD, and writes the literary travel column, “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders.

Kenny Rivero
Kenny Rivero is a Dominican-American artist based in New York whose practice spans painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. His work explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, symbolism, and language, often deconstructing Dominican American histories and reassembling them into new visual forms. Engaging themes of fractured narratives of identity, familial expectations, socio-geographic solidarity, race, and gender roles, Rivero draws on cultural influences from salsa, hip-hop, house, jazz, and merengue to Vodun and Santería traditions encountered in his upbringing. His work is held in major public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Rivero is represented by Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, and Morán Morán, Los Angeles, and is Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Charles Moffett will present Rivero’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery on December 12, 2025.