Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

The Cold The first suitor gives you a bird with yellow plumage, a gray and sharp beak. The tone of the feathers dazzles you, amazes you. Its texture caresses you already. You find the color, you don't really like, exquisite. But you think you might love it, enjoy it. A beautiful animal, but its song is brief, almost like a chirp and it never stops, it distresses you. A second suitor places his hand on your cheek. Then your exposed skin gathers a tremor without anguish on those fingers, a desire that changes on that hand to the shape it cannot change to on the lips. You look into each other's eyes and an insane embarrassment fills your cheeks with purple feelings. Your hair fenced with implacable relentless hairpins flaunts you differently: you're not a girl anymore. You drink from the glass set before you at the table, with fineness, with firmness, with hunger. The drink tastes flavorful and you enjoy it. It's s...

Muñecas Se parecen tanto a nosotros congeladas en una pasión calva o ausente la mirada, como las vacas, sus pestañas flaqueadas bajo frágiles sacos de hielo. Sus ojos, blancos con fiebre, una larga enfermedad. La superficie pálida del trigo deslizándose lejos. Te di una muñeca de piedra, su rostro, una manzana seca marchita, pero sin turbación. Nos enseñó la arrogancia del silencio, cómo piedra y Dios nos recompensan. Las muñecas no dan nada. Mira  tú  bastón, mira cómo incluso hasta el tacto desgasta su brillo cuando el mango toca la mano. Cuando niña, herviste tus muñecas, para mantenerlas limpias, presentables. Las agitabas en enormes cacerolas para poder doblarles las manos y los pies en poses increíbles.  ¿Cómo te gusto? Inclinándome hacia atrás, leyendo en voz alta un delirante libro. O tendido sobre tu cama, como si me hubieran tirado de un edificio alto a la calle, lección de un gobierno joven a su ...

            Dándome Tragos con Orfeo Después de oscurecer, el bar lleno de hombres que parte de mí ama―la parte que se desnuda afuera de la ventana de del señor Omar, recién divorciado dueño de una pistola, oh, señorito Omar, ¿Dónde estás ahora? Orfeo dice que él no pereció, no se convirtió en ceniza de la luz brutal, encontró un buen trabajo, ganaba buen dinero, tenía su propio seguro y una casa, era un esposo decente. Sé que el empobrecimiento reside en la palabra descenso. El ruido del bar hace una especie de silencio. Cuando Orfeo me entrega sus gafas de sol, veo cómo el fuego lo cambia todo. En mi mente estoy detrás de un hombre cuyo sobretodo se eleva por encima de sus caderas, tan firme como lo permite el tacto, diciendo que no me olvide cuando me convierta en el líquido de donde nacen los nombres, leche de sal, leche-dulce, leche de animal. Quiero ser un ser humano sobre el cuerpo, desa...

Rain and Toothless Angels - to be Published in "Ink In Thirds" In my city, it always rains. Water falls with an intensity that only belongs to fables or dreams. Serious, insistent, almost solid, a cloth made by hands without eyes. It rains on currency circulating in shopping malls, on every ticket drenched in sweat and bile. It rains in courts, archives, between sentences, minutes, articles, amendments. It rains as if someone were trying to apologize, and their voice crumbles into the drops. In the street, toothless angels slip while begging door to door. In cemeteries, the dead spend the eternity we gave them fixing drainpipes. Clouds do not pray for the salvation of nobody: they’ve been baptized by places of happiness. It rains: a clumsy gesture covers buildings, moistens their foreheads, windows are silent. The memory of my city is a puddle that wets legs, softening my paper bones. Memories, like dull-skinned fish, swim aro...

The Balancing Pole I get tired of searching for a scene where my number flows of confusing stomach growls with cranes in mid-flight of lukewarm drinks and beer without foam tomatoes without flavor and another full moon that brings no sighs nor the memory of a cuddle. I get bored of not agreeing of bending my head to interrogate meridians. Meanwhile, my palm looks for the balancing pole, the breath.

Needless to Say Today, all is distant in the house of dead mirrors. Bitter will my memory be, tart the steps in this transparent home. I've learned not to die a natural death. That's why I no longer need to share my thoughts. I’m like the cracks of the house without verandas. I live riddled by irredeemable language, grow crackling, deafened by a filthy light.

Undertow Tanka Review is Open for Submissions.  Send 10 of your best modern Haiku and/or Tanka.  Art is also accepted, we tend to favor surreal paintings. Send your submissions to: undertowtanka@gmail.com

It’s Summer in the Heart of my Blizzard The rain that hangs on the coat rack is infinite and light, like old foreskin dripping its resentful flaccidity. It is the anonymous principle of time impregnated by stupid angels, a fury of orphans and forgetfulness that does not end end end Summer afternoons do not know how to get down on their knees. There is always a genital murmur in them and an obstinate propensity to sleep. Weight scale that balances the nostalgia of things, scissors of light for the umbilical cord of the stars. Summer is vihuela, rotating stars and vihuela. Siren Tamer, summer counts its exploits. It evokes cut nipples, conch shells, pupils, angelic and exquisite tortures. I, immersed in the depths of the ink, just listen, like one listens to an impertinent drunk.

Clown Suite If I learn to paint existence, if I keep a Bertold Brecht in my drawer, (Man is born in the Bertold Brecht of his shirt. Children's eyes and anxiety knock on his door) this gulp of Japanese rum would be just like a son of a bitch rose. But this small insatiable country of drunkenness promised us transience, Pedrito, almost like a back-lit photograph. It gave us many blank pages and some scribbles. It also peed in our socks. That's why I love clowns. For their contribution to the theory of horror, for their wide and happy shoes, and for the Bertold Brecht that redeems the usury of dwelling in this rough alphabet.

A Poet's Epilogue The sudden flight of a startled butterfly reminds me of the serious impertinence of approaching matters without breaking with anguish, without forgetting the leaven of wounds. to be a stone in the depth of the stone I'd rather be a cross in the depth of the cross

About Profiles Sharpened in the light, like a sunrise doctoring himself in water, I look at how you lean on the magnet of your own shadow, as if you were a dream clock in the sweaty age of the planet. You are a fire cloud for the dolphin's plumage, the scar that travels from the nerve track of insomnia to the sulfur eyelid of an unclaimed god. I am the man, the throbbing eye in harmony with my uproar. Incurable tenderness suffocates me with the hands of oblivion because I speak alone to the crowds of your name. I am inside the small cavity of your dust with no possibility of a return, I look at you with the wise inconstancy of vinegar. I am the man, the dream, the eye.

Written on the Breath of a Crystal My faith is pregnant with black hens. I advance toward water urgently hitting the aftermath of time. I'm the feeble god that scratches the weight of terror. Here the afternoon is an ulcer but I like it because it’s in the latitude of suckling knives which are the skin of the dream in which you name me. Look at how this love of wires and equinoxes digs sea and sea, shovel and word. I have a caterpillar and my Quevedian faith, fertile and hairy as peace in a prairie. This faith snores when it talks about your absence, when it caresses the teenage udder of vinegar at the foot of bravura. Light creaks while I sing to the feline heart of your number, and my pencil trickles to the bad meat of knowing who I am, the open window to the muscle of a scream. Clot, kiss and faith, long-lived water in absent lightning. Here my terrible and polymorphous heart loves you in the simple milk of explo...

Coffee With Underhill 12 30 2016 just read one of my poems on CLOUDSOUND , Reasons to post a photo of a dead child from Aleppo...

Cooing the Man that is Singing He sings like the secret of stale rags. Opens unexpected seed pods. Grows eyelids to relieve our poverty. I break the dream that drew me to his voice and leave through a window to another jail where I fast in labyrinths stripped of leaves by music, disfigured by foam. I write so as not to lick the floor. I compose homelands  with oxidized tongues  (landscapes  with closed doors & mud ankles), islands of guitars without strings. He sings like skies feed on watches to make our days believe our right ear is a boy soaking his memory in The River of Docile Waters. He calls out my name, my silences of squeaking doors, my butterfly scars.