Tanka
there's not a single wind that doesn’t know my shadow... dead butterflies overpower the dawn light on my eyelids
Posts
Tanka
I pray I won’t die alone in some dark corner of a hospital ward— singing an opus of horseshit and pearls
tanka
I've been wondering: Do things happen when you drink too much. Or is it just me and my twisted fishnet imagination.
December Lights
December Lights Back then, under a cold December sun, you’d arrived naked. I’d ask for permission so you could to stay under my shadow. You’d close your eyes and open your skin, to walk me through brief appearances of galaxies, infinite transit of heartbeats, death strolling down our legs.
Tanka
sparrows peeped as I walked to the drugstore… searching for the day when nothing remains but a quivering mayfly
http://www.poetserv.org/SRR36/ortiz.html Published in Salt River Review Sergio Ortiz Topography this is my story and place of birth a wheelchair a body wrapped in a sack a childhood jerked around like an unwarranted curse and the stubborn useless desire for a pair of tailored hands climbing up my thighs Timeless You, in my gravest hour, perfumed with silence—what images caused your fruit to fall? You left me shooting cannonballs at non-existent stars. Nothing ever removed the water you gradually painted on my lips, no theatres, nightclubs, tuxedos. Not even jetliners or churches.
http://www.thiszine.org/poetry/good-morning-gulliver Published in THIS LITERARY MAGAZINE Good Morning Gulliver by Sergio Ortiz Welcome to my day Gulliver, the dogma of “no strings attached” embellish my fingers and toes. Welcome to the nausea tranquilized by the calla’s bribe allowing the animal beneath the skin to sleep. Welcome to my Mapplethorpe’s finger fuck, three dimensional and stepping-off what’s left of hair, lips, eyes with all of its deleterious offspring fastening a rope around my neck to asphyxiate the desire to hate or love. Welcome to the libretto of my aging crevices touching and melting no one.
tanka
listen to me, seagulls that cry like a great sad wheel, the day mother died I rode a horse for hours
Tanka
a fire blows smoke into a man’s silence as he rests in the arms of a woman ... a city in terror
tanka Sequence
tanka Sequence reading with the lamp on I see a crater where our bed last lay… we watch the distance burn you are the last ring of smoke to be held tight… we’re lucky we’re not art, I’m a full cup of water how silent the trees how loud the shots of hunters how broken the crow wings…how hidden the pocket knife tearing desire sunken moon my mind suspended in the sky… moonlight cannot polish stone or pester our transparencies
tanka
elephant family killed for ivory— homeless man gives kiss of life to a bunny thrown off a bridge
Tanka
For my aunt Ruth, 86 years old she bears her decline with a toothless grin, silent under a barrage of unkind words