Poetry:
Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz
Puerto Rico
The Caribbean filters through my head. Sun stroked
at a variance with valence, I remain still…
A drunken boat now surfaces a petroglyph—
no, this won’t do. Nonsense breeds nonsense. Perhaps if
I described how some giant, simian hand—thumb
appended, whole—pinched earth’s surface, and fathomed it
falling from the sky like something biblical,
making the ground swell now, here in Puerto Rico,
I could, in lines as taut as they are metrical,
begin the story of a re-alignment, spun
out of peripheries coming into focus
freighted by the violence of my head-shakes, like thoughts
deep as molars cusped, like cerebellums sounding
developing dyslexia: a thing forever
precocious, mutably symmetric, dramatic,
syllabic to the point of me depending on
my finding sound geometry in a language
incurable in its use of proper English,
I, who have written about a dead brain knowing
all the while about my mind’s malleability,
now breathe into my lungs the sea’s immensity,
and from this rhythm driven by a nothingness
momentously digressive in its grandeur I,
by the shoreline picking earwax out of one ear
now another, here begin: I pour my right hand
into my left and make running water movements
feeling the ocean floor in the palm of my hand.
Concatenated coral, jagged and fissured,
karmic and crooked-looking down to every last
predicated particle, grants me symbol’d speech.
I pronounce words like Piñones and terruño
and, with a more human than simian tongue, pull
an English tashkil out of an ocean’s tilde
till my tongue tenses in perfect ñ denseness.
The sounds which it emits feel arthritic—and, when
standing where they’re most likely to burn—aortic,
apodal and apical. Inoculated
with a feeling of horizon, an ocean freight
liner appears before me, and my footprints, eyes
multiplying out of a solipsistic joke,
appear reminiscent of the desert sidewinder
convincing me all history is Vichian.
To this viper nestled in my mouth an ñ
I, repeating what I’ve said an octave higher,
spiral as I’m struck conscious by the thought that night
is falling—turn color as I’m dosed with pigment
after pigment as I watch, standing on a beach,
conceivable as earth, a sky’s azure ferment.
To resurface a drunken boat, to feel one wet filament
hold a mountain range together, to pronounce ñ
kun fa’yakoon, and thus regain my use of speech,
to breathe in through my trachea that selfsame wind
which now applies its breath upon my frontal lobe
and turns my tongue, rolling, into a Möbius strip,
or, to simply feel the ocean’s breeze on a beach
somewhere stranded on an island’s coastline: Puerto
Rico, how mutably horizontal, how much
like myth, how long adrift above the ocean floor
nimbus of a thousand-sided periphery,
island of a most blinding Caribbean sun
human in concentration, simian in pull,
before I fathom myself falling from the sky
creating something of a people’s avatar
ñ in likeness, somewhat drunken, stilled in skull;
before I surface making water edge. Water
a petroglyph handed to me in my palm’s hull.
Self-portrait as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson
Were I given the choice to be a pair of twins
I would be the most famous pair on planet Earth.
Mary-Kate (the generic image) is never,
The concept (Ashley) is always, a judgment.
When I am made putative by what a twin is
In its physical aspect and by what a twin can mean
As an ergonomic thing, I am better positioned
To discover both in relation to who I am: one squared
Self equidistant to meaning. Mary-Kate finding
The WKW in awkward, awkward, is Ashley saying,
“Earth is a one hundred percent hard hat work site.
No hat. No work. No Earth.” When Ashley believes
All neurobiologists who study the nervous systems
Of jellyfish are bellybuttons, Mary-Kate is having
A primitive British fantasy inside a sperm whale’s
Blowhole—I translate: my heart normally beats
Without the help of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen,
But they can alter or stop its beating if they choose.
BIO
Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz has been published in The Acentos Review, Tonguas, and Sargasso. He lives in the Bronx and spends his time traveling between New York and Puerto Rico.