Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

The Martyrdom One hundred and thirty-six mirrors whirled around him like a hurricane, the reflection of his heart on The Hand that shapes existence. Mountains gathered around a line of blood. Radioactive chain reaction dripped from his open wounds, and I despaired. He left me dressed in shades of purple, aflame, lowered back into my coffin.

The Smell of Sulfur The odor of sulfur is as strong as the company brought to the podium of Titans. Gaia and Ouranos spit angry epithets at each other in the armory on Boulevard where the effigy hides bottles of gin. On television, the rib-tickling, righteous Titan gets an opportunity to explain the notion of drowning in the desert to the nation recently targeted by white supremacist. The program furthers The Graven image’s intent to build a wall.  Is it to keep some out, or trap everyone in? Women tip-toeing north through the desert leave an uncomfortable trail of blood too long to ignore, rivers of pearls buried under the roots of ancient saguaros on Cristero soil. Words pronounced by the Shebang Smoking Idol don't mean a thing to thirty million butterflies. They were there first.

Postcards Willie, when Eloy showed me the wedding rings I broke out in tears. I was so innocent, didn’t even know why I followed you to Bolivia. Yo fui la más callada de todas las que hicieron el viaje hasta tu Puerto. 2. Write me a poem that will bring me back to life, papi. Be my distraction, or I am going to find a tall, blue eyed angel with baker hands and lips like James Dean. A dormir se van ahora mis lagrimas por donde tu cruzaste mi verso. 3. Negro, I’ve murdered myself so many times the effort is starting to hurt. Someone stole my poetry. They wanted to teach me to write on paper. As if everything I do isn’t already written in blood. I begged mama to help me die, but she refused, had to slash my own wrist. Todos los ojos del viento ya me lloraron por muerta. 4. Do you think ghosts can ask for asylum in Cuba? Willie, take my clothes off. Look at my scars without crying and tell me I’m beautiful. Don’t li...

Intimate You saddle the other me, the one you empty each disappearing dawn, the bulldogger with a bitten lip. I am crowned with psychedelic corollas, dreams beyond dreams. I learn to forget by forgetting. There is nothing left of my ecstasies, or the color of my obsessions, not even the seize of your mouth on my words.

A Reverie of Horror He finds the hallway leading to death's wrinkled Greta Garbo legs. Children standing by their mother's broken mirror have their own boleros to remember. Spiders weave the stench of his sour jungle, a vile outbreak of colloquial monsters. My father sings a duo with my father.

On the Day of the Dead On the day of the dead, Pablo put on his pants one mummified foot at a time. It wasn't his fault, rain was the true culprit. Clouds followed his feet for years, poured whenever he tried to cut bread in the City of Glass. His soles cracked, sprouting roots. Julia entertained on her balcony, levitating intimate secrets. People on 42nd Street attributed her faculties to a Santero visiting her family on the day she was born. She stood tall and elegant like the mountains to the south of Black Island, Pablo's home. Her face had traces of unforgettable pain. They married. Julia, carried down the aisle by two old lovers, found the last bottle of rum hidden in the trash before the wedding. She bled life into a gutter, no one recited her verses. No one knew she was Ambassador to the Island of Poetry. Pablo was one mummified foot at a time closer to banging pots and starvation. Medicine denied, orders from th...

Collective Madness Around the house the flakes fly faster, And all the berries now are gone' Birds At Winter , Thomas Harding Overexposed driftwood is what we are. Bewitched by the light, pretty little cento, eclipse enchanted with rainbows. Our childhood memories linger like pastoral triolets rolling about meadows. Luck has nothing to do with interpreting the veils with which we choose to cover our faces. Enlightenment happens after we fall. Madness comes in the form of eyes appended to blood dripping rocks when our demons fail to cross the river. Never is where we usually drink tea and endlessly suck on lemons. Smiles are inevitable when we spar with strangers. 

Silent A chorus of genuflections filtered through the kitchen ventilator and knelt beside my bed around midnight. I knew Georgina was dead. My rocking chair peeled its mahogany finish in her honor. There were loud knocks at the door. Neighbors   packing axioms, guns, crucifixes, shovels. “Hi, we were wondering about the odor?” It’s not coming from here, I’m not dead yet. Occasionally, I see apparitions of myself standing by the window, behind the shower curtain, but I still go fly fishing. Mother came to me in a dream last night, gave me the password to a house where boas reincarnate into possessed lizards catching mosquitoes on maracas. She said, everything spoken becomes water, blends. I am going to stop talking for seven years, but first let me repeat this a few more times Harmonizing the sacred          Harmonizing the sacred        ...

My first sin was to ridicule a mocker, and hate him with clear adoration. For in so doing, I became the beggar and he the overlord of my will. Now I know the devil, I know Rome in its last hour.

Gray and Dead I’ve thought about dinner parties, the theatre: things no longer in the budget. Sex. Doctors. I’ve thought about cohesion, Clairol, Herbal Essence and Eyeliner. I’ve thought about outreach groups, raisins, peaches, and kiwis. Still-life paintings in my city. I’ve thought about The Voice, and meals on wheels. About slam competitions, and another twenty years of less, and less of a line that does not disappear on its own. I’ve thought about mangrove crabs living in mud holes, pushed back into the closet.

Toilets I’m in love with a homeless man. Now listen, we’ve got a lot in common, H.U.D., lawyers, politicians. We have heated discussions about the face fucking activity in the toilets at the Whitehouse but when he stares at my dick and licks my nipples it’s just me and him.

Para Recuperar la Desnudez Mi pobre pueblo, decenas de zapos y reptiles políticos invadieron sus aguas. Ahora todos nos odiamos. Virus de ranas con putos zapatos de cocodrilos. Me huele a brea, y a trabajo forzoso. Me huele a despedida, y a año electoral, a mulato a punto de perder su reelección. Me huele a rezo, a incienso y a San Antonio de Padua naufragando.

Two poems up at Fourth &Sycamore

The End of Night I exist to be conquered. I, set against all other I’s, am a stillborn poem taken out of my mother’s womb. Once I was immortal, condemned to endless mornings, empty of the knowledge of manmade rituals. Until out of my mouth that knows, came the shape I was seeking. Now I want to be a waterfall of hummingbirds covering our bodies. Sometimes I read you under another twilight. In that half-light your voice is different. When you open your wings you do not look like yourself but I know that it’s you.

The Alembic Soft humid hair trickles from his torso to his belly button. I moisten my lips. When the fruit ripens, he places it in containers fashioned in scented Spanish Oak and moss. But to me Jerez is not what gives him the fragrance of Montilla. It only forces me to savor the memory of his abdomen.

Dolphins and Moons The sword of perfection is unworthy of mention in my lovers presence unless it be drawn with regret. Bones wear out with age, fire can be extinguished, but simplicity is better chained to hearts, like dolphins swimming around the aura of a lunar eclipse a centered pendant. When my lover touches my hair I shatter into dancing moons.

ISSUE 10 OF UNDERTOW TANKA REVIEW IS UP!

Invitation to Dust Am I poet or sheet of paper, my soul asks in the cruel infinite /night of the sea that is never serene… Manuel Ramos Otero , Invitación al Polvo You, Manuel, the seductive arch of a bay, a drop descending on the half-light, feet circling my suicide hour. We were tangueros* of the same tile, tropical byway, creek mist, and love's insomnia. Dancers with the white silent breeze of despair. *Boleristas take their stilettos for a stroll while you burn your tongue, nail it to your pride. I spit on you, all you neutered men and women frightening children playing in schoolyards. You’re nothing but a simple invitation to dust.  

The key you lost                            lives like a fugitive on your skin. It is the prelude to our memoirs, a poem fused to nectarines, an exploration through Copper Canyon, visions of Haiti’s angels licking my ears, a hypnotic belly dance on the sand matching the colors that mesh on your hip scarf, an experiment we refuse to put down, an invitation to cross the doorway of the home I no longer occupy. The key you lost is not the manual of a digital camera, or calendar entries for next month’s readings. It is not a Popular Mechanics article you wrote to put food on our table, or a classified add on craigslist. It wants to be the bungee jump into the pangs of a deer in heat, the obituary of bolted doors, a list of all the vacant walls on which we'll scribble our erotic graffiti. ...

Cheater I gather lilies, set them on the bed where you are absent. Gone. Going up, going down, inside a hotel elevator with a stranger brushing his groin against your hand.  Yes, stuck with another man pushing his arm against your elbow.  You slip away with him into a corridor until you reach a door that he opens.  You enter, let him take off your clothes, while I wander about the house, looking for you in the geometry of our bed, with the fear of one who just arrived to his first unrehearsed death.