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Poems

by Nanette Rayman Rivera

Edna Pontellier Left at the Altar

Where's the lace from Latin's lariat?
Background thread unravels, the rain
changes quickly. She has to get that
she can stay dry, not run through it.

The exceedingly lucid exceptionally frail
pistols and stamens of lilies die near
the mallow roses and cast an O
to her mouth she hadn't expected

Lace-filled lips hold pins to cushion
the blow and the rain in stretched
shadows reiterates that milieued thread
is wed to the deflowered dress and seams

her choking worries the lamp and its wayward light
sends her into nods to the truth that he left
to symmetry a sinister weather
with the rain in dappled breaths all along
her spine as she runs through it and into the sea

Previously published in MiPOesias

Dancer in Rehearsal, Desires

I don’t know what to do with my heart.
It pulls like scalloped fabric over the costumer’s pedestal.
Every beat an amateur dancer, the girl in-between Julliard
and Jardin aux lilas, pink feet in toe-shoes, anklebones snapping

like batons, and shouldn’t break like that, but do.
He surprises by his insistence on the outside.
When a prima ballerina relevés by, I see one girl battement
her foot, incensed over her imagined lack of grace – and me,

I’m worrying he won’t notice my batterie, swelled and pulsed
as birds released at once. I can tell he watches us through streaks
of copper sun, his eyes are the tide creasing and colliding.
The prima ballerina sighs. Her arms look like magnolias

curved over, her voice inside the stamen-red hanker in our thighs.
There is an ochre stew of clouds and drizzle as he runs toward
the lighthouse. Perhaps he meets a lover there. Maybe he’s off
to collect shells to lie at her feet before the thunder breaks.

Perhaps he’s only getting out of the rain, his fine
moveable mane alive and wet. I do my best
arabesque away from the girls, last chance for him
to see me dance on the bluffs, wild with overgrown hibiscus.

He could touch me with their cream tipped mouths –
he could kiss the areola of my lips. I could let go
of my straps, waiting for thrust in the pistil
of my throat. Ocean-music all that’s left of my body.

And the maiden-grass, which is what my heart
must look like deep inside my breasts.

Previously published in AntiMuse

Stifling

In this amalgamate and anomalous light
she pleasures in her body, placing herself
near the hyacinth branches, naked before
the full-length mirror, fingers shelled

around the budding globe of her belly.
It is spring and the air and mulberry congeal
by symmetry, this woman lost in the cocoonery
of mothering and the dream of the archaic

fostering of silkworms retelling her own private
status, the spring outside and in posing as if
concentric within the other. She read
that it begins with the minuscule pearly seeds
women pour into delicate hand-sewn sachets,

hands them snug to their corseted breasts.
Women as incubators, their bodies nurturing
those nascent silkworms, waiting for the first
shoots of l'amorie blanc to sprout, nourishment

assured. Placed in their own cocoonery, the
roar of their munching like a hammering monsoon
amidst a shrunken, deciduous woodland, delicious
sound, the sound a mother loves to hear, the

sound of growth, expelling all effluence, raised
to an unalloyed sheerness, clear as a ready white grape.
And you, woman, mother for a full ten days, mother
who redeploys according to need, to nurture again,

your need safely hidden and tiptoeing through
the universe as the silkworms you've birthed
have faded to nothing, like blue sky for clouds.
Medicinal light of afternoon as you remove

the cocoons from brushwood ladders, as you
steam them so the butterflies won't burst
through their shells demolishing all the fragile
spun thread, because the thread is everything.
The reward you're expecting
never comes, but the stifling does.

First published in MiPOesias

Woman Marries a Homeless Man

I think I’m sorry I did it. You see, there I was surrounded
by x-actos in the shower and migraine-sun

so yellow it had to be born of Fate,

that’s all. Gasoline coffee and greased ox-tail

before they kicked us out.

I was grimy, my hair cock-eyed from metal-chair sleep,

my fingers all sticky from meat-blemish I dripped

on my sundress, and see—

he sees my left-over loveliness,

walking me to the river. He traces trapezius

on my back with a gun, points

out which flowers he’d pick for me,

if the cop behind every other bush was fired,

which ones stretch faces to the sun –

puffing out, quick

as desire takes desire

and aaah— the shock of his lips

( French Vanilla coffee)

makes an urn of my mouth.

Have I told you I felt clobbered, being lovely

for a homeless man? His jeans were holey and slick

around the tops of his Harleys, his eyes weighed

down his face. On all-night grass he carried me

like an ether, blue and pale away from the shelter

into shelter. We meet to touch, knowing

we’re doomed, our tongues have been taken away.

When he placed that gold band on my finger,

and said I Do, the fevers came where my space

once was. He lodged his body into the coming

of this ribald season. This is no mistake.

He’s the moon luminating, a rod of uranium

through housing project edges polishing my lot.

Besides, I told myself to stop thinking of wings.

All that low pressure above and high

pressure below. I’m no gliding humming

bird: I just know my life is his

voice thin as onion paper. It acetylenes

sweet asylum, and when I grow wild, I am.

Previously published in my book: Project: Butterflies by Foothills Publishing

Nine Days Homeless and

he’s put his hand in mine, in a triolet,
in tornada and moans, I want to grab
my hand back, and I don’t, he’s a street
guy, a vaquero, he’s younger, a muchacho malo
he’s got a flamboyán face and he’s stealing
indiscriminately from my future and his
past. we’re walking by the river, come,
baby, come, he says, and I don’t
know if he’s genuine or a parasitic
terata, I just know he could render me
like the insides of a clam or the shape
of fire before it burns.

I’ve only been homeless nine days
and he could sexain me with fingers,
it could hurt my skin like a biopsy.
he walks me to the river, summer’s
stiletto legs loping through amber
sand. I don’t have a grain of sense, just
these grains of pomegranate, these bullets
he bought me, then ice cream. he takes me
down around the sunflowers with long green necks.
They swerve through me like he will- wait
a long while before you touch my face, wait
before you boil me with those eyes. Calyx
opens out, keen and voraciously calm,
What takes me’s no more
than surrender that knows
this is one way to be fed.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN HER CIRCLE and AntiMuse

Nanette Rayman Rivera writes from New York City . In 2007 her first poetry collection, Project: Butterflies was published by Foothills Publishing. Her first chapbook, alegrias, was recently released by Lopside Press. She won the Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction in May of this year. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Arsenic Lobster for poetry and Dragonfire for non-fiction. Chantarelle’s Notebook nominated her for Best of the Net Anthology. Other publications include The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Pebble Lake Review, MiPoesias, Lily, Aiofe’s Kiss, The Worcester Review, Carve Magazine, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pedestal, Sein Und Werden, Carousel, Barnwood, Wheelhouse, Poesia, Anti-Muse, Stirring, including Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Wicked Alice, Snow Monkey, Small Spiral Notebook, Three Candles, DMQ Review, Chantarelle’s Notebook, including Featured Poet in August, 2007, Flutter, Jack, Words and Pictures, The Externalist, Grasslimb, A Little Poetry, Her Circle, The Centrifugal Eye, Red River Review, 5 Trope, Velvet Avalanche Anthology, TRIM Anthology, The Cherry Blossom Review, and Mindfire Renewed, Forthcoming: Panamowa. Farrago’s Wainscot, Green Silk Journal, Mississippi Crow.