Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

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.