Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Erotica Babel is blind. He has no eyes so he touches, rubs his fingers over the words of men that in the terror of their silence know there's a secret. Babel’s pleasure is fast and hard, it comes from far away and rumbles inside my heart with the noisy jolt of a sleepwalking volcano. It drags an ancient mud. There are broken bird feathers in its pubic hair.

insomnia, a piece of man, an aquarium full of hissing snakes, and I’m alone, naked on the bed sheet  imitating zodiac signs.

Elegy I dreamed about you, you were just like you were, no slip-ups in your voice, motionless shadows for arms, and statuesque genitals. You copied yourself, you were nothing but the foam of your own life. I felt you were deified verse in my dream. My sadness did not fit the bottom of my pain, and so I went to stain the night in purple. The noise your legs made could have awakened a pond, the hours that never went beyond bloodletting, the silence of many windows. Tenderness wept from one of your nipples to the other. Last night I dreamed about you and I couldn’t tell you my secret —because love is a magnificent apple tree with copper fruits wrapped in skin made from the intelligence of leaves that recall the future, and roots like arms mired in the snows of sainthood— even my fingers couldn’t find you in your perfection. My very presence would be violent, so violent  I'd fill you with wonder.