Lisa Allen Ortiz

She writes about family: wedding, children, her husband's rash. A wild pig roots in her yard "clawing and hunting in the stillness between us." As wifely duty she has brewed 5,400 cups of coffee. "In exchange I'd like forgiveness, a bouquet of roses and to see you naked in the morning."

She's good at this. It's her first chapbook. They're not all keepers, but enough are. Here she writes about a tortoise:

He's the size of a coffee table
80 years or so they say, dumb-ass slow
but with cinder-burn eyes.
He eats nasturtiums. We have our health,
he says to us. Suffering and the end of suffering, he says.

The house was burned to rubble, ash,
skeletons of charred beams. The humans survived
because they were out. The bird
(exotic, singing, caged) died. A firefighter
found the tortoise in the ash, walking out the melted

garden gate, all blessed in soot.… (mehr)