Sergio Ortiz
Sergio Ortiz is a retired English literature professor and bilingual poet. His recent credits include Spanish audio poems in GATO MALO Editing, an important Spanish Caribbean publication, Maleta Ilegal, a South American journal, Indolent Books, HIV Here and Now. His poems are also forthcoming in Breath and Shadows.
I write the newspaper headings,
pour more salt on my tequila,
stare at each individual crystal,
frighten away old precipice birds.
When he's fed up with being invisible
and doesn’t want to be a vintage pic
he walks to the beach, plants feet in the sand
next to a tropical grape tree and waits.
The swift banks of my memory
suppress drunken details. I hear
a dissertation embedded in the vases
of death, the abyss that rubs
my shortcomings on your chest
To defend José Lezama Lima is a right
defend him from God and from the hell
of majuscules and luck
stiff-necks and influxes
of the azure
I am the guestbook pages
hundreds of people, with a single name
and many languages, sign.
Elegies chase after me.
Somewhere in our body
there is an alarm, an alert thermostat
sending its pulsations, something that says:
NOW!
