FORGOTTEN
By Sergio Ortiz 

The Things We Draw on Maps

There are men who write
where men don’t speak

peaceful revolts
which overthrow bloodthirsty kings

business men who give undeserved gifts
music in the middle of a battlefield

strawberries in the woods
people who meet & understand each other

amazing triumphs of love with no strings attached
There are small precarious paradises

along the path we walk
on the shore of a wild monstrous sea

where it smells like grilled fish
& festive laughter

where we play without rules and balance
in unison on large red hammocks

where we embrace & lose track of time.
Where we forget with cheerful vehemence

Forgotten

He arrived from Lebanon
ready to repair and sell carpets.
Gold and ruby fibers
put the mystery of time to rest.

He doesn't know
the twentieth century
will part like a blizzard,
same as every other century.

When night barges in
without hands
ticking won't be necessary
―mountains
and magical mango trees
will shed the last light
of a lost recollection.

Blood says nothing
of his Maronite prayers
or of his grief in an old
Kobayat alley
where he scattered
his childhood.

A longing for an Arabic
call to prayer is rare.

Mr. Man’s Man

One day I'll know you’re not eternal
and that you don't exhale lavender,

that your sweat isn't honey. I'll learn
your hands don't shape my world,

your laughter doesn’t own my hours.
I'll undergo the loneliness of stars,

the impotence of the sea before the moon.
That’ll be the day my sunsets end.

Voodoo

 
He offered me
a handmade box

with floral motifs
and voodoo pins

inside, four tiny children
nailed to my body.

He said: I'm yours
even if required to prick

the bolt between my legs
and that viscera, the heart.

Pessimistic butterflies flew.
I heard their flapping

in the shadows. The snap
of a nonexistent tongue.

Ephemeral Hatchling

A bird lands on my garden.
I know it’s thanks to the discontinuous
pixel movements of its brief
leaps on the grass.
Its slight figure rummages for supplies
with its childlike beak
between the tiny leaves
on the ground.

The grass, I tell myself, the grass
is where the food is hidden.

I'm about to decipher this mystery,
it’s like the poetic breath that precedes it.
Always something violent, the breeze
blowing stronger,
or the very sensitivity
of the hatchling sensing
my garden is non-garden
a wasteland
a fiction
a reduced green apparition
in the courtyard of the house.

When just like that, the bird flaps,
flits― drawing pixels like it arrived,
and disappears.

Then the house faces
the reality of its troublesome stay.
The common everyday trappings
feel enlightened
as if its ephemeral presence
provided them with fleeting certainties
and endless senses.

About the Author:

Sergio A. Ortiz is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 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.