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.
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!
