Published in Poets International, The Peregrine Muse

Published in:
http://www.theperegrinemuse.com/PoetsInternational/sergio-ortiz/
Poets International
contemporary poetry from around the world

sorrow’s home

war raged in Vietnam
and peace burst out of flowers …
there’re battle lines
being drawn, nobody’s right
if everybody’s wrong

when I was a child
I knew encyclopedias
and dictionaries
and wire clothes hangers
beating on my skin

I looked the other way
as long as playmates
groped me like a girl
and wanderlust
nurtured me

I sought adventure
in the shady closet
where my stepfather
littered my pride
and pain

my people
floundered in dark clubs
seeking
rooms where perfumed
rainbows glistened



Orpheus’s death

when I wrote
of men folding in their tight skins
like apples —
apples swelling inside me —
it was a mask

when I wrote
of a god singing
and dancing
near the window —
it was a mask

there are no apples
filling my hunger,
no god folding
in his skin,
there is only the memory

of my self
torn at birth
by my own music



Tanka # 101

Why must she fret,
this fragrant rose …
is she not meant
to know the essence
of her own red bloom?

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