Fiction and Poetry

Sevilla
by Antonio Mota

Walking Home from Le Quattro Porte around Midnight
by Jackie Goyette

The Wait
by Jim Nasium

Le Suquet
by Ruth Mark

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Fiction and Poetry

Sevilla
by Antonio Mota

She will melt you
In her thick pagan air

Your watch and phone
Will stop in the glimmer
Of the Guadalquiver
Where chains as heavy
As gypsy songs
Hang from golden towers
Guarding the city
From corrosion of progress

Growing from nowhere
From everywhere
Yellow, red, orange
Flower petals solid as steaks
Broader than your head
Fill all Andalusia with purity
And your perfumes
Envy them their scent

Under shades of canvas
Hung from rooftops
You will find the bullring
The outer walls are plastered
With Torridas
To be performed by the masters
The father's brag of El Cordobes
The fathers' fathers of Manaquito

Inside the irregular circle's
Whitewashed walls
Memories settle
Stories of innumerable musky bulls
Who have seen their one chance
At glory
Picadors pierce and jab
At the hide of charging modernity

The simple taste
Of the fried squid sold there
Lingers the rest of the day
Even as your tiny existence
Is ignored by the se
Iberia's greatest cathedral

The se is cavernous, black
Perfectly offset
By a towering minaret
From a mistaken era
Only pigeons hear the muezzin now

Behind the se is an orange grove
Here oranges are always in fruit
In Seville oranges grow in every courtyard
And if you stand for too long
You will forget you are not one of them

The Alcazar sits among its subjects
It is solid
Perfect
Impregnable and unmerciful
There are hundreds of battlements
And from each one a Christian's head rotted
Until the Alcazar was conquered
By those who had not built it
Or anything like it

Its defense is its deceit
Once inside you are baffled
By how weightless
Delicate

The walls were not carved by mortals
They could not have been
There is piety of stone
Carved In marble and granite
Threading through lattices
And arched doorways
Laid in mosaic on the floor
And laced in gold throughout all the halls
In these carvings are all the truths
Of the Koran and the Mediterranean sun
Whose glow fills the palace
As fully as the Holy Spirit fills the se

In the courtyard
The Garden of Mercury
Ancient Betis lives on
Here stone melts into the pools
The vines have not grown
An inch
In eight centuries
You are fooled here
You cannot tell the manmade
From the otherwise

And for every Roman bath rebuilt
And for every mosque destroyed
And for every campo stamped out in high heels
There is a Latin song
Chanted at Holy Week
By pretty girls on horseback

And you wonder if Seville
Will win it's crusade against the future.

• Iberian Cycle: Lisboa