Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

My favorite poem is up at CROW HOLLOW 19, Murder Four , Spring 2017

Opposing Conversations If I stare at the wave,   I turn-on the irony of oceanic depths. If I stop the air with my dead scaly skin, I break-into desolate barren places.

Wise Audiences  When you're inside me  i don't know if you laugh  or if you come from boredom.  if your tongue freshens  or arrives from fever.  i don’t know  if what you search for  on weekends  exists   inside me.  i know life stretched out  beneath your abs   is the same as snakes  and concurrent solitudes that correspond  to the twinkling light  where i can see you.

Poems Up at Rigorous : Last Truth and There was a crime ...

dead bird wings  spread out over the frost of my emancipation thought i heard chimes ring announce a vision of mine  abandoned mid desert saguaros i opened my eyes lips for words that inhabit approaching bodies of dangerous animals i do not dare bite

Let's Stay Home and Watch a Movie What else can I say? Blood gallops in the streets and inside the Whitehouse head first into the face  of an office manager. Darts into the song of birds and inside the Malls downtown Blood bolts everywhere We're not safe in the bathroom, or buying chocolates! We need a bodyguard to go to the florist and if we dare say we want to visit a museum, uff We won't exist long enough to see  we're in the Blue House that's no longer blue,  nothing blue anymore, not even the sky Everything turned violently red blood sprinting in the streets like the dirty hands of the president like Red, Red Sunrise and Red Mary To see red houses, love, we don't need to go that far

Canto to Men I sing to the destitute souls to their ancient lineage of shadows to the corpses of hope and foam of days Canto crisscrossed by absence wound of time that spreads to unarmed Mythologies shredded by crumbling hours  when staring at you was always my design informed face of all my solitudes  accomplice of the deepest silence I was once able to endure

Memory Lapses   all the women I imagined had your face they were all you  in their own way, I was you  in my own way too free me  from unfulfilled  desire its useless worry its vain misery I don't understand your way of loving my love  what do you love if you run away at last you have returned or you didn't leave or I didn't leave the fact is you're here & I don't know if I am

free me,  disappearing island & painted sea,  not from memory but from  the light that is desire painted sea & disappearing island not from memory, from light that is desire― free me

He left like a   rambunctious whirlwind looked back smiling in silence wore well-laced boots did not forget the tears bent corners without dropping eyes no diminishing storms in site drew an ocean on his pale cheeks  with all the pent-up pain I do not matter! a step behind the other’s back closed fist nibbled heart & swallowed rage spit lahars bit himself so many times that all he wanted was to hang bright stars while flocks of birds crossed  moonlit skies 

Muddy water you sent me your floating likeness it sloshed when you stomped  the pool of water Slippery wet echo you sound like paper  crushed by hard stone hands Your rusted teeth  and muddy being breathe in air bite the memory that cannot return You chew on the tangle of stones and dirt splatter your conceited  smelly self all over my page and profile

When Your Hearing Aid is Off Those rare eyes contemplate a grotesque city drowned in graffiti, tombstone for exquisite corpses. Where I come from people talk about sex to encourage laughter. All trust their genitals to the mouths of others. All. Trees are paper crematory urns, and water carries death camps in its oxygen. I'm deceived in believing I can rewrite all this pain.  Having a clear conscience is a symptom  of poor memory crowded between us as if it were the sole opinion as to what  the meaning of facing each other  to discriminate is.

Poem Up at Blue Bonnet Review , it's in Spanish: Mi Mar

fleeing  to Sodom  with Descartes I announce the method to curtail love … the fib

Diversion Photography has no other task -shows the void  where no one  molts their skin Words lit the Oracle  that no one beckoned and the street inhabited  the elusive passage  Someone left us  the wrong amulet and left In the mirror my shadow creates  another shadow All the loneliness of mankind in the latter act

Words carry the shadows  that break the voice in stones the loneliness of pens ink's void Men hang their mouths  on oil-free streetlights with the knot  that tie's their shoes  to extinction Mute word who knows more than the taciturn?

Ephemeral Hatchling A bird lands on my garden. I know thanks to the discontinuous pixel movements of its brief leaps on the grass. It rummages for supplies with its childlike beak between the tiny leaves on the ground. The grass , I tell myself , the grass is where the food is hidden. I'm about to decipher this mystery, it’s like the poetic breathe that precedes it. Always something violent, the breeze blowing stronger, or the very sensitivity  of the hatchling sensing my garden is: a non-garden a wasteland a fiction a reduced green apparition in the courtyard of the house. When just like that, the bird flaps, flits― drawing pixels like it arrived, and disappears. Then the house faces the reality of its troublesome stay. The common every day trappings feel enlightened as if its ephemeral presence provided them with fleeting certainties and endless senses.

Burned Memoirs I've kept them for so long they smell like scandal. One after another they rhapsodized our days with unimaginable desires, forbidden wines that never ripened poured on the dregs. Burned in the backyard they no longer mean anything only the coal of years or perhaps your fruit, supposed nest of tenderness, barely the blade of a paper flag blackened by polluted winds. The photographs responsible for the ferocity of earth multiply inside my memory like your skin once agitated my breathe. You're nothing, I'm nothing, this never happened and for the time being the always treacherous memory will be our dubious shore.

Poem Up at Ascent Aspirations Magazine: Friday's Poems July 14, 2017 Issue

Poem Up at The Good Men Project

Voodoo He gave me a handmade box with floral motifs and four voodoo pins inside, four tiny children nailed to my body. He said: I'm yours even if required to prick the bolt between my legs and that viscera, the heart. Pessimistic butterflies flew. I heard their flapping, and in the shadows. The snap of a non-existent tongue.

Point of No Return A dart points at him from the corner of its eye his aftershave gives the afternoon a senseless titillation. A kiss hangs on a thread of that invisible line drawn in the air like the flight of an insect. Can that faraway flash of the lips, those bits of ardor in words be called kisses? Time passes beyond the two men, the point zero of love.

Let’s Sail Together There are footprints that persist in the fertile land of silence and oblivion capsizes between luminescences sunrise gathering on the skin. It was mine, the dance you denied. There are dreams that should never be tossed into the current or doubt. We will sail together. Our vessel can never be sunk.

The Things We Draw on Maps There are men who write where men don’t speak peaceful revolts which overthrow bloodthirsty kings business men who give undeserved gifts music in the middle of a battlefield strawberries in the woods people who meet & understand each other amazing triumphs of love with no strings attached There are small precarious paradises along the path we walk on the shore of a wild monstrous sea where it smells like grilled fish & festive laughter where we play without rules and balance in unison on large red hammocks where we embrace & lose track of time. Where we forget with cheerful vehemence.

The flood stopped after nineteen days. Men emerged from mud. Built their houses on vigorous trees they later called The Tree of Life . That's how they worked. We, chastened crows, wait for the sun to solidify the earth.

Forgotten He arrived from Lebanon ready to repair and sell carpets. Gold and ruby fibers put the mystery of time to rest. He doesn't know the twentieth century will part like a blizzard, same as every other. When night barges in without hands ticking won't be necessary ―mountains and magical mango trees, will shed the light  of a lost recollection. Blood says nothing of his Maronite prayers or of his grief in an old Kobayat alley where he scattered his childhood. But a longing for an Arabic call to prayer is rare.

3 Poems up at The Basil O' Flaherty 

Mr. Man’s Man One day I'll know you’re not eternal and that you don't exhale lavender, that your sweat isn't honey. I'll learn your hands don't shape my world, your laughter doesn’t own my hours. I'll undergo the loneliness of stars, the impotence of the sea before the moon. That’ll be the day my sunsets end.

Martini Barhop   Did you like Waiting for Godot?                 I didn't get it. That guy, what was his                                                                        name? Godot, baby, Godot.                                    Yeah him, he never showed up. That's what it's all about. Most people don't understand. Tell your friends at the law firm that you saw it. It'll give you status.             Let's get a drink. It is two in the morning.        ...

Poem Up at AMARYLLIS : Piece of My Heart Piece of My Heart Ms. Joplin your voice rips apart my face, my tie― the mark of all hanged men. My remains roll on the ground and the edge of your voice blows my Monday into pieces. I have the hunger of the employee staring with contempt at the image of his face in the glass door. My hunger, a factory of anxieties, its certainties, is convinced that nothing will improve, that this flagship raised during youth will also sink. My last refuge will have to be the skin or the solitary bottle of whisky. Janis, your voice is a knife vibrating in the throat of pain. But now silence. I have come to the place where little masters live and I hurry to annihilate the desire of damning all to hell.

sentry nowhere left to look the rain cleared the way no dream with open doors       the only devotee         confinement outside, night strolls  on its high heels I lie in wait of myself the hours trip  on what I never say

Spring Birth Born in March, I was never baptized, my parents decided I should decide for myself. Grew up in a Wesleyan school. I have recited Our Father Who so many times I'm dumb. I don't miss  the uniform, the ties, or the chemistry teacher. Now I almost never pray. I liked not being popular. But I've had more than five good friends. Raised in an exclusive neighborhood of an inclusive city on rice-beans and pork chops. The first grandchild, nephew, son. I was, as expected,  spoiled. My grandfather was a poet and a journalist. Grandma hid his manuscripts,  but I read his poems in secret. Enjoyed my family,  although I told them little of my life. Collected the songs of Felipe Pirela. Discovered love at twenty, wept for the love  at twenty-six, confused it with lust  and transformed it into  a good many farewells at forty. True, the best shags are not  those one-night stands.

Poem Up at Door is a Jar Magazine

Poem Up at Excavation Lit journal, Toilets, I'm so glad this poem finally got published.

PIN Quarterly Journal just published two of my poems. This is a Nigerian publication, and I love it! The poems are: Bare Embers, a gay erotica poem ( breaking ground, since I hear there is a 14 year prison sentence for being gay in Nigeria) and There Were Windy Street, an anti-Syrian war poem dedicated to the Syrian children.

Canine shadow bleeding gargoyles      canine pluslachrymal amid bastard                contraplayful rubs of my very absent       margins Nymphomaniac hawk             with ululation hounding predream                     hymens. Viable delucid             canine shadow penumbra riddled by interrogating          red harpoon cocks, deep gray ivy              cockeyed weary guest inside the wrong         apartment.

Poem Up at Psaltery & Lyre

Poem Up at YES POETRY

Urban Apparition He emerged from the underground, or was it the sky? Injured by the noise, motionless, silent, badly wounded. Kneeling between the afternoon & the inevitable, veins attached to horror, the asphalt. Holy eyes sagging, completely naked almost blue, that’s how white he was. His bare skin a nectar petal, a bipanel chest of soft full moon, such echo of my echo, fuck beats and tides. Give me your balaa. *balaa - means “calamity/distress/trial/misfortune” in English

Superardent  I'm still alone, following myself & the following, in another self-engrossed empty mud pile on neurdead paths. Opium hours, chase me with so many other beautiful seashells  & erocrazy conchs,  fleeting deaths, absent memories, other greasy oozes, constructs that oppose me while I follow myself & the following, superfollow myself from one end to the other ardently, without being with myself or the other.