Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

My book of poems sleeping in the meekness of the pond… the child’s eye knows nothing of refraction aphorisms scar the skin of water, the fragile trace of truth a foggy journal sealed with lead… days of waiting waiting for dreams… the smoke of failure and the abandonment of petals, all forgiven

Gazelle I feel, smell, liken him to a gazelle under the rain, a warmth that leaves with the mist. I put him in the column of a poem, he leaves with the nervousness of a gazelle frightened by the hand crossing his moist back.

sake rites celebrating rice and bamboo… the moon becomes an umbrella, moves with what does not return Japanese fan… a haiku inhabits my spirit like a mailbox full of nostalgia malodorous of sugarcane and sour snuff

Cutting out his tongue The problem is not whether a poet dies, or if his hands are stained with blood, or his body cornered by maggots. The problem would be how to cut out his tongue. 

Enough for today I’m going to sleep on a piece of burning burlap, the blade of a mill. I have a light that dazzles, a reptile, and a package of fava beans. I have lost, but to have an opening, a perfect hole, makes up for what is lost. When I write the graffiti of my grief I have the arrogance to summon a downpour. That’s why I’m stronger than the void. I don’t know how banks made off with my country, an island of castaway Jonahses.

It may be but it’s not true Sweet, sweet man you turn on the light and leave, torn clouds bring fresh memories, and you so poor             / inscrutable, dumped on the breast of fire. Your wife wants to set herself ablaze, while a timid bush uncovers your essence. It is the door through which you breathe the odor that crowds bands of beast. Poor boy        stopped in your tracks             / by the hallucinating blow of       I can’t. Death never insinuated itself to you more than dust. It stood like a stone in your way, while you gathered a cluster of open, bleeding, dismembered guilt in the faint-hearted act of resting             / under the tender stupor of laurels. No, you never were, not in the slig...

To Omar - After years of not knowing where you are You are the nothingness of a transparent mane, an empty groove, a torn breath. Oblivion and the void of sleep are what you gain from fate. Winter nests inside you dejected like lost bird.

in my body’s depth throb fear, water the enjoyment of watching your eyes… clean as dead words

he said, love is tiresome… we looked at each other, birds suspended in the same air

On my way to Disbelief There are times when everyone remembers the living as if they were dead, like time disappearing from noisy places. I want my life to fade over a globe I want it to be inspired by the silence where all things are hushed, and not even God survives.

I wanted to be a tower crowned  with seagulls, the sigh of the wind through the clouds

Here lie my father and my mother each as they were, separated countries for whatever reason. Their ashes did not end up in the sea, their names came from the wind. Silence finally reached them.

Future Holocaust My country is not bread and wine. My country are the ruined cupboards keeping us from devouring worms. My homeland is the rain which made the cupboard a hotbed of moss. It is combustion and heartbreak. My country is us, the ones formed out of the flood.

Nature Slippery we are because of self-preservation sharp words in the waters of goddesses sinuosity of fishes gets tangled in our body something is condensed in our rusted presence something rises as a response to sound is almost erased when it upsurges but here we are wearing the perfect disguise.

Ash and Dust - To the Westboro Baptist Church Their tongues are hurting me. We levitate at dawn and return to the ground at night. Dirt and silk. Silk lasts three generations, dirt is forever. My bones burn under my skin, but my flesh is asleep, like a rosebud, a house to live up to the standards of the gods. —I didn’t come here to be illumined. —I saw fanaticism sheltering them in a blizzard of prayers.   Their mother is a cow. Look at the cow, your second mother! Isn’t it a delight to gaze inside a mirror? Ash and dust. It could happen anywhere. Hill is not the same as jungle, or wild the same as mind. Your shadows cuddle on horizontal time to extol calamity. Marble and horoscope, a sign for your empty mouths. Is this where you consult the future, the transformation of the children, the hidden flower of sin?

To the Westboro Baptist Church You come to buy poverty in Orlando? Who makes a home in dignity’s house, luxury or filth? Notice: the cow, pushing through the thicket of the immaculate. Everyone prays in the temple, but you pray to the elements of your body while walking burdensome paths, and crossing dust storms, surrounded by the smell of dry blood. You buy poverty with your eyes and pay with words.

Orlando 2016 - It rained lead It rained lead on night’s silence. Frogs jump from my mind. The crescent moon is dead, it drowned in blood the guiding star once sheltering Rumi while he dreamed his lover.

Llueve Plomo Llueve, llueve plomo en el silencio, saltan ranas de mi pensamiento, muere,  muere la luna creciente, se ahoga en sangre la estrella que alguna vez arropó a Rumi mientras soñaba con su amante.

You and I You, dressed in snow within my nocturnal pages, dancing. Full moon in the black lagoon. I, vortex of shadows curled up on your white lap, beating. Alabaster coal seam. You, pupil of mourning in the white lead of my eyes, liquefying. Obsidian teardrop in the sand. I, quiet lotus in the darkness of your sorrow, opening. Night pearl petal.

Under the skin of an oak , in its emaciation, my heart is also naked, stripped of bark, it tests the white calligraphy of oblivion, cuts the veins of desire already in a drought. Under the dark skin, the driest light, I open the channels for your fast-flowing rivers, and follow the footsteps of your efflorescence through the paths of a soul no longer mine. I’ll orient myself to bird and sun so that my voice is warm and loud. I won’t reveal your names. I’ll write an empty                concave poem                    so you can pour into it the honey in your eyes. I’ll wait for your rain without moving. Immerse me in your calm waters. I’ve walked towards your high twilights like moss that decorates the forgotten crevices of a wall. Make me your hollow bowl of love, your nurser...

Discovery this house has windows to look in from without. . . the only freedom here is my confinement outside, night passes by with high heels… one is left hanging to oneself eyelids never collapse I move forward groping I bump into the furniture that time forgot, the door of the room we will enter without keys

Ella Ella siempre fue Eva y siempre busco a su otra Eva con la clarividencia húmeda de alcatraces. Nunca se arraigó a la lluvia, ni se acostumbró al vuelo de pájaros traicioneros. Pero perdió su memoria y se arrimó al interés personal de tetas secas que nunca la quisieron porque haber amado a Eva era pecado. ¿Ahora, que  está   sola y demente cuál será su destino?

Running Out of Time Dawn is burning, it illuminates the ruins of my heart, the wide vaulted corridor of my heart, the passageways of earth inside my heart, the marshy floor of the cavern of my heart. I look for my sinking body, a body already missing from my body. Is piety reborn from shock? The gate opened and it did not manage to move me, my feet have forgotten how to walk without the weight of fear. Weightlessness scares me and joy moistens my parched lips with silence .

the terror of flickering years in the capillaries   of my father’s eyes… forgiveness and dread