Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

When Language Breaks The most genuine tree fills up with you and your larvae. The narrowest street, the one full of gossip, inhabits you. Water pronounces your name when it suffuses our hands with pure beauty. You draw your face on the most horrible dry winter leaf and I still recognize you. Although the world surrenders to us all it's impossible to reach you. Right now, no one’s home. Only you. And you're howling like a wounded wolf. A part of me, of your light, left with to the last name that names us. The other part, the smallest, disappeared with your voice. I mean, your voice was the language of everyday things when you lived. Now language is the skin of the world. That's why we always baptize Death wearing blindfolds. That night I talked to my father who sat at the table. I said what Sharon Olds never could :: The photograph I wanted to find in the family album :: Brothers and sisters t...

I got my hard copy of The Stillwater Review where one of my poems appears. Excellent printing job, I love it!

Issue 12 of UNDERTOW TANKA REVIEW is Live! Painting by Mario Carreño Morales, Encuentro Junto al Mar

a river  runs through my life thirst hounds me

Abacus Sun Names covered with ivory exile enter my room isolations whitewash the walls camouflage, their trickeries Even the purest air brimming with morning white thins

Poem Up at Califragile, A new journal owned and edited by one of my favorite poets, Wren Tautha: On My Way to Disbelief 

My first Collection of Poems, Elephant Graveyard , will be published in the US. I'll let you all know more as soon as I can.

Tattooed with Chinese Script I wake up every morning before the rest of the city to open the birdcage so you’ll hear the bird sing. Wake up broken, open the cage, gulp the tears, blow what remains of my wings at dawn. My eyelids are tattooed with Chinese script. I put away my cross-eyed heritage, my short path to erotic paintings, my wet torso moaning with desire, to call out you. You know my dead, my gestures, my prayers. You offer them food, serve them my eyes that never sleeps, have not lived here for a century. You name the bird, guess if it is captive.

Letter #51 Today there’s a self-drawn sketch of rice on my forehead, a tiny sorrow. This mourning is the unhappy reward of what we never talk about. Today I tire of birds, cut off my wings. A tiger devoured my arms, an old disgruntled tiger. It drank my blood, disappeared like smoke resembling the roar of an insomniac ocean. Today I walked into the surf with my pockets full of rocks.

Youth carries with it the demanding, relentless need to relate everything to love Martin, I sat on the doorsteps of your house. I saw flowers with leaves like swords. They looked like soldiers. You were a soldier. You marched into my life. I came to say, I love you but you were not here, so I wrote it down on a notepad. Martin, I stopped writing to let my arms hang uselessly over my body. I always sat down and waited, even as a child I bided my time. All women wait for a future life, their images forged in solitude. We see bridesmaids walking towards us, a promise, a man, a pomegranate that opens and displays its red, shiny grains, a pomegranate like a thousand mouths. Oh, my love, we are all so full of inner portraits, so full of unappreciated landscapes.

I dive into those tiny pitfalls that set us up for life, traps as small as the cages to hunt sparrows. Some days, on specific days, Mondays and Fridays, when opening my balcony, I look and see with all my senses, hear with all my senses, smell with all the senses. I am a stubborn fiddle in evidence, a delusional excuse and life flips on me like a card game. It makes me fall in love with new lips, hurries and makes me as essential as driving credentials, a: here is my hand, my millions of hands. My skin quivers with infinite pity. Humankind kills, dies, lies, steals, gives up with its back to Beethoven's Ninth in the voracious desire for permanence. Confuses freedom with movement. Sleeps armed against other men and against the little man inhabiting the clearest corners of my chest despite that music, despite the sun that rises. Despite the fierce, clean, morning Ode to Joy denying the spoils of yesterday's dinner. Life...

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

I believe in empty spaces . . . the honey of his skin against my face, the wounds he left in my pith

Who I am and What I Remember I am a freedom that frolics, still beautiful. The sensitivity of a talking parrot. The girl who dropped her coconut panties and kept walking. A black hen's egg that traverses my spine and wakes me. I am the nose that smells the adobe of my neighbor's house. A scolded photograph, a thin line in the middle of my absent city. A water flower, for other flowers but not for people. The resin that San Vincente wept. I am a bittern that drowned her song in another language. *** The pain cannot be contained long enough The tracks fade under the snow of the white hug of forced departure I have tried to write truth on buses ships and trains but without an ear my tongue is dread it clings to a single word The train crosses a bridge black ice joins each letter of my journey Where is The New Colossal demolished      knocked down     deposed?

Forced to Leave Where are my footsteps going? Nobody knows. A cloud of dust accompanies them as well as the helpless memories that strip away my skin and my soul leaving me water on the ground. I pull on them at every step. Why are you taking them away, why this ungrateful exodus from the country sheltering my feet like an omen of the exodus to no man's land because my country no longer exists? Someone’s taken it from me! My footsteps hurt. They're tiredness, they're pain, they're weight, everything carried on my shoulders. My head and my feet shout the pain of this barbaric eviction, the unjust exile to my beloved homeland, an exodus I don’t understand.

When Darkness Falls The girls dance alone, the men just stare at them. They imagine the girls kissing. When the boys get excited they begin to kiss each other, rub their beards & lingual barbells to the rhythm of technopop. Some are amateur journalist. Some are strictly DIFFERENT but EQUAL Or as they put it:  DISCREET. At five in the morning, they kiss and touch then high speed out of there & BOOM … they craaaassssh. Night ends in tragedy. What do they do? They wait & hope morning doesn't arrive, return to the corner where travesties do their rounds for money, throw in the towel for the speed of a gesture, the volatile in their emotions. A few brushes against each other are enough to tighten their waist & make them feel the pain of hard-hitting dolls. The solitary beat of the rhythm will break the rapport between eyes. They don't play slow music,  no one plays the blues anymore. 

The desirous believe (poor idiots of hope) that someday a man will create a signature drink made of a thousand breasts and a sea stupor compelling our thighs to tremble. They think saliva men will show their luminescent tongues and open our eyes to a brave new beginning. Dazzling man, refugee in a fire without end― Then we will not be able to move. Our flesh long and wide, desire satisfied, will be appeased forever. We'll lose our eyes and never be the reflection of insanity again.

Coyote Be vigilant of the coyote He'll butcher the jacaranda. We must avoid an ambush. People who know the spells of language advise we strike a match against a stone and light up a bonfire to keep the animal away. Political coyotes scurry off when they spot a fire dancing in the air.

Cooing an Innocent Boy He sings like the secret of rags with eyelids that relieve poverty. I break the dream that drew me into his voice and leave through a window to a jail where I fast in labyrinths stripped of leaves by his music. I write on the bare branches to avoid licking the floor. Compose songs about homelands with oxidized tongues full of stringless guitars. He sings like skies feeding on watches to force us to believe the boy soaking his memories in the river is not made out amber alert teardrops. He calls out his name, leaves fingerprints on the wings of a beautiful butterfly.

Epilogue The scare of a butterfly reminds me of the serious impertinence of approaching matters without breaking with anguish, or forgetting the leaven of wounds. To be stoned by the depth of a stone I'd rather be nailed to a cross by the depth of the cross. 

My Aunt Hermelinda The story of my aunt Hermelinda was always bothersome. Lost, according to my father, for a year in Yugoslavia. Missing, according to my uncle, on the ship back from Argentina via The Sea No One Knows. Survivors confuse the paths of the dead with their own, they no longer know what dream, what memory is from whom. Was she lost in a time without calendars, a sea without waves, a ship without walls? Didn’t she know that while she was alive, however far she went into the Nameless Country, she’d always return to the Refugee ship? They eventually found her, but if she found herself, nobody’s telling.

Tangled I am afraid, that's right, fearful of tangles, the barbwires of your dream, of your arms shaped like prison bars. Remember what winter meant to you: the sea, ships entering port without a single casualty. The wind, remember the wind, softening your corners?

Nur of my dispassion… you jump with your back towards my face. I adore your back, extremity sprinkled with kindness! I don’t want to see your eyes full of so many hurtful pins scrutinizing my eyes, coloring them alkaline in a face to face farewell. Do it in front of our friends so I don’t charge and kiss you. May our embrace rush the heat of my mid-day hunger before the world becomes toxic.

Soliloquy One word explains another. Take “loneliness,” it’s a gap a stone falling into the void, even the air hurts and walking is not enough, sleep dies but you sleep. Loneliness is to search for your height, your exact size, in others, or rather it’s to divide yourself and form a broad chorus of nothingness.  What horrible loneliness is in the one who begs for affection by blemishing tenderness. Let laughter be laughter and hatred be hatred, a man be a man.

Cocaine Let’s plow the devil’s property until the day of the golden ring and the cloying gala with an anthem to the Blessed Virgin At the Love Market you find buttocks paralyzed by rubber dildos whisky, gold, and other assets so you drift in that direction so you’re not short of goods in your old age You’ll open your eyes touching your husband’s back He’ll squint and touch your backbone You’ll both load fingers and hands smelling of drool, shit, and lies the devil’s property You’ll sleep like devalued currency cheapen gestures without any real meaning Two separate lines on a glass made of ice dreams You think, you stir, and you join disengage images of your days of silence This is how you wake up, attracted to the roll of bills  time despises and uses to consume you

Kesha Rose Sebert  born March 1, 1987; formerly stylized as Ke$ha is an American singer, songwriter and rapper. In 2005, at age 18, Kesha was signed to producer Dr. Luke's label Kemosabe Records. Her breakthrough came in early 2009 after appearing on American rapper Flo Rida's number-one single "Right Round". Kesha's music and image propelled her to immediate success, with her debut album Animal premiering at the top of the charts in several countries. She achieved 3 more number-one singles, "Tik Tok" and "We R Who We R" as a solo artist, and "Timber" as a featured artist. At the same time, she continued to write songs for other artists, becoming respected as a songwriter. Warrior, her second studio album, was released in 2012, and spawned her eighth consecutive top-ten single "Die Young". "Tik Tok", at one point, was the best-selling digital single in history, selling over 14 million units international...

Vinny Rivera  releases his new Kizomba single "Compatible" following his tour in Europe taking beautiful footage for the music video of both the Nederlands and international model Lillyannheaven.  The EQS Team of producers and engineers have much in store for Vinny Rivera's upcoming album "La Cosecha" due to be released in October 2017 which promises a refreshing music list of energetic writing and production.

Steel Band Song A cricket slept between my thighs & a bouquet of splendid flowers which was also fruit a soprano butterfly a bee & a turtle dove a singing, dreaming duet slept between my thighs. But one day a hyena of disconsolate laughter ―razor of a turbulent stroke― silenced the Turtledove aborted the cricket’s leap banished the fruit deported the butterfly & disbanded the duet Now I have a lot of nothing dying between my legs

It rains cardinals burdened angels rooftops rattle while red cardinals beat against the moonlight it rains angels that are actually cardinals they talk to us from the infernal howl of their sudden drop it rains badly injured arrows inordinate inhabitants of clouds burned by our insanity spitting fire dropping from the swirling loneliness of our blindness

A stone in the water of sanity the coordinates that sustain us between perfect  isosceles triangles hanging on the shadow thread of sanity between here & there & that between this point & that if I swing on its rhombuses I'll see space multiply under the brief arches of saneness I'll see its gestures trimmed & equal if I get off & sit I'll see myself bobbing

Poem Up at Futures Trading ,  "Next Best Thing" by Me

mariposa de ghetto a los quince zozobre a orillas de un faro a los treinta compre una falda azul para mi sepelio

Poem Up at: Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, Bare Embers   Bare Embers By Sergio A. Ortiz You, naked stretch out on my skin like a hill bitten by the sun. The fruit slips, grows, swells, it’s burning. At six in the mirror you enter me as the most expectant guest, simple as a river of light. You cover me with your man skin. You, the tongue that runs through my veins to silence me. You take my eyes off painfully and give me two other arms with which to weigh life. Your mouth drizzles on my back. You scratch my back and write your name. You talk to me with your bones. My moan, the longest sound you’ll hear tonight. When we are alone, still naked, when everything is over, it hails. The air has just discovered us.

here: the eagle, the tiger, the heart on loan … for joy, a sad soul between my bones

No Longer in Need of a Ménage à Trois (in the voice of Janis Joplin) I'm willing to accept that not all men are for me. Not even the ones I like. You must also be willing to accept that you cannot have us all. But I can be your man. Be your man. Man. Think about it. If you love me, I'll make you feel If you love me ... If you love me, I'll make you feel as if I were the only man on Earth.