“An Animal Resembling Desire”, “The Last Threshold” and “The roof”

In Poetry Issue Five by Sergio A. Ortiz

An Animal Resembling Desire

An Animal Resembling Desire

Under an undecided bird
the day whines about orphanhoods,
clouds of absence hurt
a dark, putrid silence.

One by one the city awakens
its dead under a tired sky
to offer the waters
of its most recent words.

An animal resembling desire
extends laborious wings to petrify
the only tree standing.
Under fear’s silhouette

infancy picks up its waist
and places it on a stone blind wall.
Under desperation leaves
a god made of solitudes

forces the clouds
to rain punishments
and transform boulders
into jaguars.


The Last Threshold

The promise to return
to the place where life began

Failure, to be banished
from an endless happiness

Shadows that wandered
the desert carrying their own past

A leaf-storm-fear
thrown to the felines of night

A beggar’s desire going door
to door and sitting on the steps

of the last threshold
to discuss his ragged loneliness

his bones, a premonition
of the mirror where death calls

The indelible imprint of pain
and undaunted scars

A history of humiliating executioners
and false fabulists

The unsatisfied thirst of gods
who bully us with their vengeance

and a tree who in its old age
only nests birds of prey


The roof

place where hell burns endlessly,
where we cure loneliness.

Where men kiss each other
and from their mouths gush

red rays that bristle legs.
Six walls hangout like heads

that swell in size when it rains.
Where survivors laugh

while the voice of an angry boombox
blasts. On those 2 x 6 walls

I treasured life like a trained bird,
filled my hands with its blood,

loved a man while dancing.
He loved me back

between unnumbered glasses
of Dom Perignon.

About the Author

Sergio A. Ortiz

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.

Read more work by Sergio A. Ortiz .

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