Lisa Allen Ortiz has been shot at on the mountains of Peru and held by INTERPOL on suspicion of drug smuggling in Columbia, but all the good times have been in Paris. Her work has appeared in the Comstock Review, Crab Creek Review, and Zyzzyva and has been featured on Verse Daily. Read her chapbook.
Trying to wrap my mind around living on a tropical island for thirteen years and never once seeing the ocean, I stumbled through my Indonesian vocabulary to say, It’s good. It’s big.
A dinosaur dangles over my grandson at the Field Museum near a pink thumb that pops into the prom picture of my granddaughter dressed in strapless red leaving her house in Medina …
The bill in question is actually a 2,000 West African franc note, and it’s the equivalent of about four U.S. dollars. A helpful sum, really, but as I clutch the weathered crinkle in my sweaty palm, its value feels as dirty as the grime that is undoubtedly being transferred to my fingers.
to Egg and Berry brewery, to the pack / of Czechy words I made but didn’t work / in this pink town. I’d readily go back / to your best spots, the unfired gun, that perk //
And if the neap tides of my beauty / sadden him, I cannot help it: / I hang high, the waxy night light …
Three thousand ancestors ask how I straddle / the sea, a foot on either shore. //
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