Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

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.