Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Kala Namak / Black Salt You fall beyond your sap / abated remembrance / vile fear of tears // In you my heart / is a circle of fire / black salt on the river banks of your Himalaya // And I am shipwrecked / confused tangle of dreams that mocks the cacophonous memory of the water.

Kala Namak / Sal Negra Caes más allá de tu savia / recuerdo apagado / vil miedo de lágrimas //  En ti mi corazón es un círculo de fuego / sal negra a las orillas del río de tu Himalaya // Y soy naufragio de sombras / enredo de sueños que se burlan de la memoria cacofónica del agua.

Walking on the Limbo of Lost Words the lighthouse of the indefinite trafficking voices of absence, skeleton walls smuggle freedom. My country: a poem under an illegal shade. A sun full of cameras rides my skin like ghosts who claim what is rightfully theirs. I lead the echoes of my flight to a heart masked as theatrical delirium, my wrinkled memoir   dancing to Etta Jones’s  Don’t go to Strangers . I touch your lips with my revolutionary blood and leave my confession   on your cinnamon eyes.

Caminé sobre el limbo de la palabra perdida Soy faro de lo indefinido  y traficó voces de ausencias, murallas de esqueletos que contrabandean libertades. Mi tierra es el poema que da sombra a ilegales pensamientos. Soles llenos de cámaras transitan sobre mi piel como fantasmas reclamando lo suyo con evidencia. Caminé al frente de los ecos de mi huida hacia un corazón disfrazado de delirios teatrales con mi historia arrugada. Recorrí tu cuerpo con mi sangre revolucionaria dejando huellas profundas sobre tus ojos color canela.

With No Punctuation You insist on dealing with my silence making sure no one rises to my defense Between the lips of my vulva scented flowers open locks to holes that listen to what belongs to me No endless distances no monsters nothing of the low note minced by my voice To be able to sing with amazement to sing with no punctuation or alarm

I won a poetry contest. Yes, I'm the winner of the Spring/Summer 2016 contest at  The Song Is...  I had already been nominated for the 2016  Best of the Net award  by this same journal. The poetry judge was  Catfish McDaris ,   Lynne S. Viti judged prose. "Requiem for Mercedes Sosa" was the winning poem.  Sergio A. Ortiz

Sin Puntuación Insistes en lidiar mi silencio     procurando nadie surja en mi defensa Entre los labios de mi vulva perfumadas flores abren cerraduras orificios que escuchan lo propio lo mío Nada de distancias  interminables nada de monstruos   nada de la nota baja entrecortada finamente  por mi voz resquebrajada Poder cantar poder cantar con asombro poder cantar sin puntuación ni alarma 

About Reparations to Eros         there will be no reparations May my silence never walk on the dormant back of a heron. May it leave a homeopathic drop of luck on the waters of my trembling body. May my skin bear no resemblance to the unshakable epidermis of a frozen pachyderm.   I confess,  I'm in debt to a slave driver's arms. I tasted his fruit,  and I couldn't distinguish the sour from the sweet.

Sobre eso de la deuda Que mi silencio nunca camine sobre la espalda dormida de una garza. Que deje una gota homeopática de suerte en las aguas temblorosas de mi cuerpo. Lo confieso, estoy endeudado a brazos esclavistas. Confieso, que probé la fruta mas no distinguí lo agrio de lo dulce.

Paying for a Whim ...at the age of sixty-five Besieged between my buttocks the foam you break from the Pacific my open sea prendre plaisir selfish giant of my tale and awe enter without haste without Customs as if you didn't sneak    into this banquet paint my gray hairs purple patina  fill me with wrath malformed ravens via crucis cemetery breath demanding you stay glued until I finish

Upended Far from all forms of charity, I am the prophet, the retired apostle of faith in myself.  My friends‒escape artists, foreshadowers of verses, sunk in the quicksands  of language. They believe in the melodies I babble exalting legendray elephant graveyards & mystic monsoons. We witness the paradigms of a century fall while celebrating a Wimbledon match, a joy much greater than a revolution.

my taste, that he take everything from me ... bamboozle me on the cross of oblivion

Marathon Runner A marathoner with black eyes gazelles his girth forward. My eyes have an owner. In his face, a man with many beds, one who follows the nape of old gay swans like a male about to thrust. My taste, that he take everything from me, when Jews grind their matzo. Marathan man, bamboozle me  on the cross  of oblivion.

The Shame and Fear We Sow It’s no longer Build the Wall or Lock Her Up , now it’s Shoot the Bitch. and Hang the Nigger. Outbursts, newsworthy metaphors, one more fire under Nowhere Bridge, a contemptible distraction to my support of The Water Protectors? I’m done listening to loudspeakers announce our descent into hell.  It’s a show of strength to be a powerful woman, a successful black man. Why run through the corridors of the West Wing cherry-picking slogans for a lynch mob?

In the Clear Age of Water The work of this day consists in carrying a bag laden with rain from here to there. Once done,  it's lift the bag  with our tired eyes, bury it in the lake of indifference where sad conversations rot. Let’s stamp life with graffiti. After all, we are just the so-and-so's, the whatshisname's, the Tom Dick or Harry's of life and rain is nothing more than corrected, repetitive poetry, a new pair of shoes wanting to be so joyful happiness tires and refuses to do any overtime.

This has been an incredible year for me.  After spending four years writing, editing, and publishing Tanka, I returned to longer poems.  Much to my surprise, I was nominated for a Best of the Net award for the poem, Requiem for Mercedes Sosa . I started working on my first full poetry collection, Elephant Graveyard, and it's almost finished. I tried my hand at writing political poems, and over the last two weeks 10 of those poems have been accepted for publication.  My life couldn't get any better.  I want to thank you all for reading my poems. Let's break a leg together. Sergio

Alexzander Hamilton’s Broadway Dispute What deepening twilight—scum floating atop of the waters To the States, by Walt Whitman bien-pensants with fingers in your ears and fears unheard ... our founding fathers are unapologetic

As If from Nowhere Miguel Angel's sentences  have the shuddering of what is about to fade. Memories haunt him  like a baggage car  that does not quite fit. But let's talk about his voice, somewhat faded by the years. As if words were spying on him . As if there were no throat only a guitar of spoils among the stones and snow of New York City. He talks about his mother who is in her 90's and lives on the beaches of Rincon . Talks about the wife and grandchild he’s left behind. Suddenly, death is him and this is the ferry's last stop. Miguel Angel from nowhere, the world becomes numerous, but the cold keeps its stories.

Los momentos desvanecen sin saber porque Tu y yo dentro de un espacio ordinario debajo de una pila de hojas muertas El silencio taconea      a través del desorden pescado blanco             cruciforme a la deriva            en un paño de té         finalmente no tengo bálsamo para decir lo que las cosas aparentan Sin ti aquí me olvido de no querer tocar bronceados de peón agrícola en flor tatuajes en la clavícula flequillos oscuro a través de ojos extraños Sin ti en casa este amor es un tirón estirado hasta que se afloja aunque soy el punto quieto alrededor del cual tú marcas tu travesía Nunca es sólo tú el que vagabundea

The Sand and the Forgotten on this Side of the Border Fuck A Wall  America should build a big mirror Anonymous Protester We hope the dead reconcile with the dead, so they may achieve a position among their peers. May the student and the lady in a Stetson make the same mistakes. And the victim cross the street side by side his eternal executioner without recognizing him. Shadows or ghosts, both shall pass. On the sidelines, the feast of the living is still happening. Listen to the slight music of the mountains of exile in silence and don't look back. This, and not another, is our story: The time contemplated in the fissures of the sand, The slow ripening of deserts without limit.

He’s NOT my President I eat breakfast, think of the mother of Mondays in front of a broken well, clean dry leaves  off a plank  on top of the bed calm as the man who washes gold dust  in the privacy of his house. The wind reaches into the pockets of night, sails through plazas I can't recognize, deserted avenues I've never seen, stores where promises are paid with promises. It rests in the fury of keys, draws two lines of fire on the counter of a bar near my house, builds nationalist utopias & banishes women in burkas, in front of the white house by the lake. My job is my father's old job. I care for the salt, measure the crystals, frighten away white precipice birds.

A Thousand Darknesses In memory of Holocaust Victims and Celan We went to Mirabeau Bridge and paid your promise. The hours passed on the Seine, our lives increasingly smaller  grew confident a suicide chose  the side of the Tower where nothing ends up falling. We threw our coins in the water.

Precipice birds arrived with the sea's pendulum engraved on the feathers covering their heads. Reptiles followed their flight  from below  with deadly splendor. The birds delayed the snow to visit my house and gifted me the crumbs of a closed political paradise whitewashed with decrepit lies.

The Outlaws of Canon two men coming down  on all fours from their presidential palace, licking hands and legs, dying, poisoned by their own decision             and will. Not one of them rests and as a pack they chase             exotic reindeer screaming, fire in the News Room. Depraved, language perverts howling in the chicken coop of news anchors. Ha, their fame demands a change in personnel. Yes, outlaws of canon, with accumulated miles of prostitution and falsehood, fleeing their brothers, forgetting their parents exile. No, we will not forget our stay in this country. Nor the years of delay we gave up to let them prosper. Listen to how frozen hurricanes emerge from the dew!

At the Margin of Things These days behind what I write there's always rain. Music opens a sphere and unheard of ghosts come and go as they please singing, dance me to the end of love, but I can’t. The insults, the injuries made at the margins   are unsafe halfway houses of terror, where naked orange clowns  grow balls,  and file their nails . Gravity ceases under their wet boots and it rains all over my margins.

The Drowned I want to clarify that it was not in a river but in the very ground in front of President's Park where I drowned. The only river I have in my memory is a shudder where small things sink but never disappear. Sometimes, I sink before the river passes. And my request for help is always late.

                          Free Verse and Other Ways of Cursing Imagine that when the time comes the seconds of those hours’ return with the misfortune of gravestone lethargy & that the stubborn hands of that unworthy artifact get stuck & again our eyes return to the offensive insistence of that presidential election. Imagine the clock of death, endless centuries, seasons, geological ages, species, mutation of these species, other galaxies, worlds, abysses, impossible universes, everything that could, in short, have a name, wailing. Imagine that for us it was always that moment, forever the moment of racist bigotry and misogyny …

A Wolf                       I know there’s something better down the road.                       We need to find a place where we are safe.                                 Praise Song for the Day, Elizabeth Alexander passed by my eyes leaving his footsteps in my veins. Stealthy and hungry, he stacked the city scrutinizing the future. Today the shutters are closed because in this poem there's a wolf coming to get me. Even when I try to be quiet he jumps the words, a memory rips out a howl, and devours me.

The Damage Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves The Gift Outright, Robert Frost The results came in, maybe life gave us too much at the beginning and we kept looking for a path that maintained enough of a balance so as not to become this pestilent air. Maybe life did not belong to us anymore, maybe the things we believed in were part of the damage, part of that petulant wind knocking down the walls of our nation. And if we had known the outcome would we have put our hands together or looked elsewhere, renounced everything to stay still so as not to cross the days that agonize? This is so immense it doesn't fit into tears. We heard the results later. There’s no greater nostalgia than that of the future.

Let’s go get a Drink May all the gods examine your body with their kisses making your love a moan heard throughout the Greek islands. May they kiss you in raving. What is the use of waste if he doesn't love you? How can you enjoy good fortune if his eyes do not look at you, and your afternoons do not ignite with his aroma? Come, my Catullus friend, do not suffer when he does not look at you. I understand your misfortune. The flower of my delights is resting in the arms of Zeus.

The Wound of Hate Your smile hurts, so does your voice and the sea in which you bathe, your ashes and your body. The mourning seed I feed with fire that is my currency, this long, amorous nightmare. And, how to tell,                                     tell you that I have closed eyes if at the end of eyes, I keep the almond and the broken  election. How do I keep quiet when there are halved doves on fields and fields of blood.

look! the ruins of a broken castle ... the throne emanating splendor no longer there

decanter in hand  a first hour sigh conceding  defeat ... oh! the moon, you'll search but never find it

The Mind is its own Place We all yearn to go back to the edge of that fire and kick that fucking election, the religion, the race of an entire nation in the balls so everything breathes at the rhythm of our lungs . But none of that worries us now. We worry about the detonator of tomorrows, the almond beyond the shell, the shiny nugget, and the damn heat even when we know it’s November and an eerie cold is fast approaching. We want pleasure to surround our waist.  It can be you, or anybody else who embraces my body already lightened from the burden of the world. Yes, you can take me to the sea inside where there is only the sound of blood running like a flowered beast. And so, I go back to my room tell myself,             fuck it, it’s better this way!