Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

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.