Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

The key you lost                            lives like a fugitive on your skin. It is the prelude to our memoirs, a poem fused to nectarines, an exploration through Copper Canyon, visions of Haiti’s angels licking my ears, a hypnotic belly dance on the sand matching the colors that mesh on your hip scarf, an experiment we refuse to put down, an invitation to cross the doorway of the home I no longer occupy. The key you lost is not the manual of a digital camera, or calendar entries for next month’s readings. It is not a Popular Mechanics article you wrote to put food on our table, or a classified add on craigslist. It wants to be the bungee jump into the pangs of a deer in heat, the obituary of bolted doors, a list of all the vacant walls on which we'll scribble our erotic graffiti.

Cheater I gather lilies, set them on the bed where you are absent. Gone. Going up, going down, inside a hotel elevator with a stranger brushing his groin against your hand.  Yes, stuck with another man pushing his arm against your elbow.  You slip away with him into a corridor until you reach a door that he opens.  You enter, let him take off your clothes, while I wander about the house, looking for you in the geometry of our bed, with the fear of one who just arrived to his first unrehearsed death.