The Ofi Press Magazine

George Angel: 1 Poem Published

Monologue as a Form of Coagulation   To the small mass of flesh I ripped from my face today I say, “Adieu!” Hardly a pound, More a disgraced loser Of Jacob’s wrestling match.   It asked me to bleed for it. “Be reasonable,” I said, “No one asked you to protrube.” And yet my fleshly resource Must somehow have been diminished. Reddish and soft, It must have been a remnant Of some latent romanticism. It is hard, however, to believe In self-improvement won At the hands of such violence.   Once again distraction leads me Toward a kind of nominal dissolution, And separates me From what little growth I have attained.

Poem by George Angel (USA/ Colombia) Published in Issue 32 of The Ofi Press. Image: "Faceless Road" by Lomo-Cam

 

The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California and was later awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University. He has published fiction, poetry, and essays in English as George Angel in literary magazines and the chapbook Globo (1996), and received the Nilon Award from Fiction Collective 2 for his book The Fifth Season (1996). Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, where he has published the Spanish poetry collections Mapa de lo claro (A Map of What is Clear; 1996), Muestra (Sample; 1998), Tentenelaire (2006) and El desvanecimiento del alma en camino al limbo (The Soul’s Dwindling as It Makes Its Way Toward Limbo; 2009) as well as a book of plays in Spanish, Cómo morir en un solar ajeno (How to Die in Someone Else’s Yard; 2009). His visual art has been exhibited and he has also illustrated books. Since 2003, he has worked as director and playwright of the theatre company Párpado Teatro. He also makes music with the groups Underflavour and Sell the Elephant.