BIO
Sergio A. Ortiz is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a six-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016/17 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Loch Raven Review, Drunk Monkeys, Algebra Of Owls, Free State Review, and The Paragon Journal. He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.
Last night
I slept with a faceless man
and his shadow. The seas know
nothing of the case. His caresses,
arrows that I taught to soar.
His manhood, sullen.
He hit me with a hammer
on the coccyx. We lived
that spiteful health
with which hunger kills
when laying with another body.
I had a shipwreck in my bed.
He desecrated all my saintly shafts
wrapped in God and bed sheet,
he did not ask permission.
We talked about celestial decorations
and icons. But it ended when the
saint and sign was given.
Wild Needle Raindrops
It rained inside the bedroom.
Outside these sea walls
the day is a hot red knot.
My body fills up with wet nouns.
Silence has a light-blue Spanish
accent. The men in my photographs
drowned. Their cries of distress
stopped breaking the water.
I am a moist flesh statue.
Lightning begins, embedded
in my feet. The walls crawl with electricity.
I doze off again listening to turtle music.
wise audiences
when you're inside me
i don't know if you laugh
or if you come from boredom.
if your tongue freshens
or arrives from fever.
i don’t know if what you search for
on weekends exists
inside me
i know life stretched out
beneath your abs
is the same as snakes
and concurrent solitudes
that correspond to the twinkling
light where I can see you