Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Everything eventually comes to an end I've learned to disappear inside the cracks of the path along my shuttered house this is as far as I venture into empty space… I bond with the quartzes of a moaning night

we are ripe with gifts, the moon, the first rays of morning from the East, a coffer for a faithful heart

winter I have walked through your storms dreaming within the folds of frizzled viola petals

The Pianist We buried him yesterday. Night finds little, if any consolation in the embellished stars, and although I’ve stopped crying, I still sigh. I'm listening to music when there's nothing but the luscious scent of emptiness…my haunted past stares at the future

Torture Song I saw my face in a cell at Guantanamo electrocuting his genitals, my government waterboarding I saw my face in Ferguson right after being shot… a commanding surge blasted through the streets I saw my face in a man selling cigarettes on a NYC street corner screaming I can’t breathe , and I can’t breathe

wondering what it will feel like after he's gone pulled by a rope I walk through the dark

I'm going back to a time when I was  a woman … my kimono brushing  the arid ground

unmoored launched cloudward he dreams  with heavenly music— carnations tinged with love Spanish translation by Pedro Perez Osorio sin amarras lanzado hacia las nubes  sueña música celestial claveles teñidos de amor

let it rain may it all be suppressed your footsteps in the melting snow... climb through my window after dusk

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he planted palms along my driveway so dates could ripen before my sorrows... shadows in the stream

to paint M ácacoel, he who is without eyelids,* I have used the ink of flowers* that fly  from the hidden scared caves *Mácacoel, him who is without eyelids, guards the entrance to sacred caves in Taino iconography.  He was turned into stone and placed in front of the caves for all eternity. *Colorful birds thought to be extinct.

think nothing of it if at the shrine of your life I'm cured of madness... for I tasted silence in the book of words

our eyes will meet and so I wish you well... there are boots under my pillow, memories of you in love with orchids

when I am all alone my heart is incomplete… for years, you were just a superficial distance in the glaze of memory

talk to me soothe my capricious pulse with the fluttering of chanting hummingbirds... I wrestle shadows tonight

to this day, the junipers are humming their farewells ... does the past change more than the present?

you've been  heading down the wrong road walk out  on your lover leave her for me there's a street  I walk on when I am lonely I sing, look  for signs that will tell me  where to go in peace