Poetry

Contrary Winds at Night

by

Radames Ortiz

“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