Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

there are men in this world who bid you to come you tell them:  Show Me they say:  Take My Hand

once he slapped me, that was my past-- now fire is my future… nights disappear like blemishes 

I bit him with the scent of juniper on my lips he bit me back but never claimed me as his own

wisteria, the murmur and sigh of a tree… when I was little was I a ghost?

Creation I met you by the river among the dead-- let me call you lover, listen to the sea behind me call me brother regard the tides that expose me nightly-- disguise my shadow from sandpipers that eat dead fish

I have a longing for darkness and aimlessly moving scenes... misplaced memories flood these long winter nights

we played in a athenaeum of sunflowers... before rain brought down the winter sky

trees rattle I count the stars in  the winter sky... the hours, matrons reading  my lips, watch my thighs

time is nothing but a souvenir worn smooth... a photograph of me walking in an alien body

http://undertowtankareview.blogspot.com/2015/01/submission-for-issue-5-undertow-tanka.html Kindly submit up to 10 previously unpublished tanka, tanka art, &/or 10 tanka sequence,  10 haiku. “Undertow Tanka Submission” to: undertowtanka @ gmail . com Or use Contact Form to the right *** by MARCH 23, 2015 / 5 th     Issue to be online by MARCH 30, 2015 At the end of your submission, please include your full name and country of residence. All rights revert to authors upon publication. Your tanka must not be under consideration elsewhere or submitted to any contest. Hopefully this will become a print Review in the near future. We accept submissions year-round.   *** Yes, we are accepting Haiku submissions Best wishes, Sergio Ortiz, Editor

last dream  before waking... morning fog

where the blossoms fall like kisses on the pier bring L’Incomparable or you'll never see your husband again

on the way to Monkey Island... scattering his ashes

I don’t remember enough of my life to write a biography… I was naked on the beach, the hours seized me inch by inch

there was a time when blue was the color of distance and failure, an empty room where ghosts lulled me to sleep

alive and well in the age of color blindness... I stand naked for no one but myself

sleepwalking on the way to Jericho difficulties vanish *Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around citation:  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

where is  your native land? dipped in mud... my head covered  with the thin blanket of poverty

agoraphobia... who can blame me for declining to defy such whiteness with the snowshoe cruelty of tracks

refugees on their last legs-- playground stones in the cupped hand of a lifeless child