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