BIO
Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz is a poet and translator from Carolina, Puerto Rico. His poems have been featured in The Acentos Review, The Atlas Review, Why I Am Not a Painter, Entasis Journal, SAND, and elsewhere. A film review has also appeared in Moko Magazine, and a book review and essay are forthcoming in Caribbean Studies and The Caribbean Writer, respectively. Currently a doctoral candidate in Caribbean Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Ri'o Piedras, his research interests include Sufism, Rastafarianism, and the novels of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde'. He enjoys lifting weights and long distance running.
Amaryllis Doing Laundry at her Mother’s and Whistling
Into my urethra the needle
grandma used to sew with goes.
A habanero seed, I can’t piss.
I am a burnt taste bud, attached
a string threaded through its eye.
My fingertip pinpricked,
I jab it. No pincers can remove it.
Inch it further inside. Let it
remain there—still it, the needle!
Imagine peeing on the surface
waters of the Amazon. Standing,
your thighs have been touching
for hours. The needle outlives you
within you. Your body a star
headed screwdriver, an opened
geriatric lifting eight hundred pounds
with the small of her back. Fuck.
Pain’s the absence of knees
that bend. Where’s a laser scalpel
when you need one! There it stays,
the needle, filling the space where
your body once was, the time.
I light three candles posing as my soul.
One to Saint Lazarus, another
to the Baby Jesus, and the third—
I’m feeling kind of inguinal, a hernia
bleeds—to a minute fish swimming
up a stream of urine. I become
pregnant with a rubber tire
filled with gasoline and forced
around a Nigerian’s chest.
Before his ass is set on fire, I go
into labor. From the needle out comes
a hooked worm. It voices, Eat
all foods, but stay away from pork.
I unlock the Internet’s full potential
and find Allah by way of Africa.
Amaryllis Sipping Coffee
My mother’s best friend, Yolanda,
a seventy-five-year-old high school computer teacher
who refuses to retire, felt sick not too long ago
while visiting her youngest son Nacho
in Toronto. She felt a sharp pain
running up and down her left arm, an intense
cottonmouth-like feeling in both her hard
and soft palates, and around the thin flesh
of her larynx, a sensation drier
than a nine million square kilometer stretch of desert
where at its dead center stands one lone
peyote cactus. All three symptomatic—the pain,
the feeling, the sensation—of an approaching
heart attack. Good son that he was, Nacho
quickly had his mother hospitalized,
the doctors having to perform an emergency
operation to stabilize Yolanda and insert
a pacemaker into her, evidenced by the three
inch incision running across and right smack
between her left nipple and clavicle. Back
at work today teaching, but not with the same oomph,
Yolanda feels the pacemaker controlling her,
dictating how hard (or how soft) she’s to go
about breathing, walking, moving her arms
up and down and from side to side, and executing
those gross—let alone the fine—motor skills
we who are neither para- nor quadriplegic
take for granted. Not her old self, Yolanda
now blinks knowing she is miserable. The point
here I make pushes me to barge into the school
where my mother and Yolanda teach, march up
the four flights of stairs leading to Yolanda’s
computer lab, kick the door down, walk right up
to her as she’s giving the day’s lesson, and,
with the live chainsaw I keep stashed
in my left shinbone, proceed to cut the pacemaker
out of her. Having practically sliced her
in two, I find myself lurid bloody, palming
the pacemaker, its cold polish the alkaloid current
in my mouth, and the thump-thump-thump
pulsing its way up my left arm inseminating
my heart. Reality is a zygote
in the form of a small spineless cactus.
My brother and I are ones
to whom all doors are open.