To the Westboro Baptist Church
You come to buy poverty in Orlando?
Who makes a home in dignity’s house, luxury or filth?
Notice: the cow, pushing through the thicket
of the immaculate. Everyone prays
in the temple, but you pray to the elements
of your body while walking burdensome paths,
and crossing dust storms, surrounded
by the smell of dry blood. You buy
poverty with your eyes and pay with words.
It Rained Lead
It rained lead
on night’s silence.
Frogs jumped
from my mind.
The crescent moon is dead,
it drowned in blood
the guiding star
once sheltering Rumi
while he dreamed
his lover.
Sergio A. Ortiz is the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. His collections of Tanka, For the Men to Come (2014), and From Life to Life (2014) were released by Amazon. He’s a two-time Pushcart nominee and a four-time Best of the Web nominee. His poems have been published in over four hundred journals and anthologies.