Nanette Rayman Rivera
Nanette Rayman Rivera, living in New York City and hating it, is a two-time Pushcart Nominee, and the author of the poetry collection, Project: Butterflies, published by Foothills Publishing, and the chapbook, alegrias, published by Lopside Press. She is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction. Her poem Shoes, 1943 will appear in the Best of the Net Anthology – February 2008. Publications include Dragonfire, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Prick of the Spindle, MiPOesias, The Worcester Review, Pedestal, The Pebble Lake Review, iddie, Carousel, Barnwood, Lily, ken *again, Farrago’s Wainscot, Arsenic Lobster, The Externalist, Wheelhouse, AntiMuse, Strirring, including Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Wicked Alice, Her Circle, Sein Und Werden, DMQ Review, Carve Magazine, Three Candles, Snow Monkey, Small Spiral Notebook, The Greensilk Journal – Editor’s Pick, Chantarelle’s Notebook – Featured Poet, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Tipton, Red River Review, Aoife’s Kiss, Words and Pictures, 5 Trope, Jack, Grasslimb and Mannequin Envy. She is shopping her memoir around, a story about the ‘real” deal in regards to New York City’s homeless shelter, welfare, public housing, food stamp system. The story no one will admit to. She was Guest Editor for Moondance in December 2007. She studied at The New School, Circle in the Square, Gene Frankel Studios and the New England Shakespeare Festival. She played a waitress four times on All My Children, has performed in numerous black box theatres in New York City and Boston and is listed on imbd, Turner Classic Movies and Yahoo Movies for her roles in Stephan’s Silver Bell and Guns on the Clackamas.
Amerika
Behind the walls painted acid trip white a silence
kindles the State magistrate in his rat-black robes
rat a tat foot steps scuffle outside the sketched door
the dry napes of her elbows striate her hair
the white air the rough draft
of the abyss, Nation’s rituals of all extinct women
the puff and the blister
of the long called for change
the long called for mediocre
all envy humps quietly out of the kingdom
A minds-eye figure scurries loaded
down with headshots, Vargas shots, poems - black
lines the woman’s arms slinged as if they are broken
her plumlust fingernail polish removed
They might have told you “The sins of the father,
in your case, the mother”
her small translucent hosepipes circling
the jugular, routed to the heart
it’s horrid!, it’s needed
to measure utility and the pressure
you’re under to not be
a swan. Those tubes are the swans
indivisible one nation under God
Ex Runner-Up Miss Massachusetts Denied Stamps In a black swim suit (they all wore turquoise), in red molotov pumps, she applies for food stamps, leaving the wolf of her body, hovering on the end of herself. Her husband writes her sash on her torso, implants her trophy on the desk. Her fish-out-of hour-glass perches across from the silly putty mug of the worker. Her husband rescues her from head of the household, stranglehold questions from the burning stares he saw disgust, teeth-click, teeth-click, each answer’s own little weaponry in this cleansing he burnt her sash. She plied the flesh off the clerk when he stamped Denied on her hips, stole other people’s food, stamped her lycanthropic foot as they cried and each night drew the 15th floor shades closed, like stripping a bandage off sore skin. I saw her breasts - they levitate dripping into clouds, a doleful scream that balls around hearts of other ravenous women like thin sweaters. She ate the last olives in soy sauce, sat by the empty refrigerator, while her husband praised the clerk’s madness as his life skidded the kitchen in search of his wife whose beautiful face has blossomed into fur he must love and cover, applied again submissively for his own food, stamps, leans his head out of the 15th floor window and implores the neighbor for breakfast. They live in a city by a river and at the bottom of the river was another place and only the denied (stamp) knew of its gate. She formed a doll of the clerk. Each day different pins. I see her again, pins in her ripe mouth, pins in his eyes. And from her eyes a light of wild oleander. She dances with her husband in her sash and white nightgown, answering questions, arguing with herself, laced in her husband’s pocket. Her bones are my evidence, these bones in which she trips the light, the bones are pretty inside her body, inside her sash her sash
The wound is 26 years old
and I am sitting in an upended shell
of an apartment, darned up
like an oyster. The body knots below
sea level, Sheepshank redemption—
ropes older than subways, spleen blanched
in a vizard. In the projects, cimmerian
smell of something dead or dying
parrots the waning of the moon, exactly.
Curses disturb the corridor.
How can I go on, deep-lung gasping?
Ayin hara is coming for my heap of bones.
Someone (my mother) never tied
a red bandel around my crib. Someone
transcribed a prayer off beam, the mezuzah
must be checked. Someone cries
against red graffiti thicket, rose
tubes, and the woman catty
corner , eyes the mezuzah and blasts
bass again, a joint in her pruned beak.
At the ghetto divide I run
between low-panted
drug dealers. One yells
a line from The Last Seduction:
you better run...
the others are dormant decadence
leaving destiny to turn
over an empty glass to pour him: out:
This should be easy, only -
empty glasses found in neat-nicked grass, clean
shudder in the air like souls unfinished on Sabbath eve,
the way travelers steal a piece of the village gate.
Chance of a job fuzzy as the lit stench inside
garbage left in the hall, the wick inside a tornado,
the slide into some primeval beneath.
Drown
In a room full of pretty stolen sundresses, a woman speaks
of not being her mother’s daughter her father’s secret
first wife, the transmission of her father’s loyalty
first hidden with rape-sharp panache in kitchen chats the horror
she knows at the sound of a mother’s fingers pinching arm
at the shear Mom-scissors snipping hair
in a room jam-packed with listeners she sighs with the pant of a girl
who needs a valium break
leaves us alone in the fissure no surgeon can suture leaves us
near child-guard bars on the window entirely open
doubting if borderline personality
verdict saves blame or lives
daddy-love’s vestal sheaf whipped in widen becomes to her a long
rubato irritant seeing home like eating dear-life for breakfast
tart at first but after, a comfortable internal clock
myself stored somewhere to be lifted by a passing breeze
are these my eyes shuttersensitive mucosa in my throat
exploding in non-orgasm of rooming houses mother's garbled voice
yelling through the camera of a cherrywood mirror
down yellow wallpaper. If I gawp long enough I find
homeless bird
From her mouth cries lace the moon,
and broken teeth, seven thousand pulverized
lungfuls of nerves, seven thousand more
locked perches and jaws bunged up with manzanita,
chewed cap ends, wood dowels slapped on
cage walls, two or three ribbonwood dry barks,
pretty grapevine’s eradicated yowl, rubble
of disinfected vines baking, swings, stand-
alone roosts and one thousand other keepsakes of home.
From her lips she feels only that long mandible hiss
of a blue-headed parrot wheezing in fright.
