Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

sea iris fragile flower— gulls drift on waves like paper boats

Pockets my bitter life a colorful concert hall that took all my love— there’s no such thing  as stillness  on a heavenly island sea lover under the darkened sky with pockets full of sage and calamus… touch the heart that is under you

he knocked on my hotel door and met me with a smoke… I took off the gray, my heart  pounding  in its bloated stall

I made myself a clan, and my clan scattered— I watched starlings swirl through layers of clear skies

I marry a ghost to slaughter him with love on the lost child of a desert continent where light turns to what it touches

my instinct is to head for the gutter and stomp my foot in the puddle... call it magic cutting me in two

again two stepping  on your grave... I take logic to bed and rise beside a monster

I watched you undress that Indian summer  and my guts tightened… imagining the rain on you  when there was no rain

alone thinking about the instant I turned memory into blissful sorrow and let it marinate my heart

alone at the foot of my mother’s grave beneath a morphine moon I try to tell her I lost the kettle to the well

Street Art                                                 poem by Sergio Ortiz

I am your outlawed twilight your closed fist filled with soaring silence   my mother tongue is love

a hearse turns down the footpath of dust and the cantor sings . . . there is silence a stripping of life forever

“oblivion: we sleep our dreamless sleep” you bulldoze our cemeteries Nazi Germany? No, Iran! Citation: Abdul-Baha, Secret of a Divine Civilization

silence is no longer possible in the color divide of America—pain tips hearts carving a groove in stone

northern whiteness a flight of angels came to my bedside it’s all in the sea, they whispered… the white sea of America? she got the cold white sea of the north cold and greedy concerned about somebody stealing her lollipop 

embarrassed with nowhere to hide accused of piling up a rock wall when my windows were already sealed

the faint sound of water running down the alp reminds me of another sunrise tucked away in your arms

silence piled up all week like snow falling on bare branches yet I have not been muzzled Citation: Bill Collins, Silence

Undertow Tanka Review  is now open for submissions We are also looking for Art and Photography. Sergio Ortiz, editor