Issue
#1

January
2009

2 poems by Radames Ortiz

In a Gutter Below

In these average nights
passing into moonlit hours,
I stand before the unfamiliar
region of unhappy eyes.
Savor the heated stench of
car exhaust and the thickening
smog of eyelashes fails
to bring new daybreak.
An owl haunts trees
that have been
ravaged by poachers.
In a roundabout way, this is
the end of a gray century,
spiraling out of control.
And I witness the impeccable
barbed wire of autumn air.
Following us all,
a bright string of searchlights
and the myopic gaze
of ten millimeter cameras.
Beneath the slow bloated
clouds, I desire to vanish,
to perform an erasure
of my bleeding doubts.
And everything I see,
the blood-soaked parks,
the empty churches,
the streets wild like rivers,
grows colder than this hour.
From the darkness in
a gutter below, I claim
the last failing light
while counting bruises
aching with stars.

© Radames Ortiz

Contrary Winds at Night

“We are a splattering of contradictions,”
wrote a novelist
I think of this, in a living room,
darkened with heat
This notion that we carry broken
mirrors, inside
Jagged shards reflecting
light in strange ways

What a baffled bunch we are
A catalogue of the detached
and the passionate
the certain and uncertain
of the loved and unloving

A whole slew of us
deranged by the strangle
of directions

I think of my brother
writing letters to an ex-girlfriend
imprisoned for stabbing
her father
while a strange girl sleeps,
entangled
in his sheets

I think of a girl excavating
Brooklyn for the remnants
of her bones
only to find them, unearthed
and haunting
beneath her pillow in Texas

There’s the husband
next door, enraged
and cursing,
who’ll beat his wife tonight
Later to lick her wounds
within the fractured interior
of their marriage

And as always, here I am
Deliberate, spontaneous
Scuffling between growl
And murmur
--a nervous flame
bending into the wind

© Radames Ortiz

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