As my sweet sausages and peaches drop
through the construction pit, the air that anneals
ash accelerates over sludge, gives its body
to the workers of the chasm. When I moved
up here from lower Manhattan, far from hip portico,
I beamed at clean trees that marked this garden
of calm. Beyond my known coterie
of cool juice bars, fawned over lady boutiques:
all fierce I was, all claw and blade,
so unlike any sparrow who nests.
Regardless, I’ve been lost in the downy
slick of a woodpecker’s red head, lost in the bone
- coffined shins of sawed off trees. A new weeping
willow just de-catkined, its riled blonde like liver
disease stealing along the chain link fence
reveals a watermark in a disease of fatigue.
Silver-dollared Calendulas watercolor rats out of their league.
In any case I’ve been writing about surrender—
I wonder what being a bird is like – wings,
clap loudly compasses, outskirts and ruffles of down
Ring Neck Doves, white lips on tail feathers—
The ornithologist who plied bird liming, viscid, adhesive
substance for the sake of circumvallation.
That word is behind me now
along the construction, the brown
and cream round earth.
I’m a bird astonished by all the stars there are,
all frost and steel.
The one billion free razors of my reveries.
Ah! How I bleed.
Nanette Rayman Rivera, USA
1 comment:
Nanette Rayman Rivera, two-time Pushcart nominee is author of poetry collection: Project: Butterflies by Foothhills Publishing and a chapbook, alegrias, by Lopside Press. She is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for memoir and her poem: Shoes, was published in Best of the Net 2007. Publications include The Worcester Review, Oranges & Sardines, MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, Carve Magazine, Stirring's Steamiest Six, Pedestal, Wheelhouse, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Barnwood, Snow Monkey, Three Candles, Sein Und Werden, Carousel, decomp, ditch, Prick of the Spindle, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Dragonfire, blossombones, Barnwood, Dirty Napkin, Arsenic Lobster, Magnolia, unmoveable feast, Thirteen Myna Birds, Hobble Creek Review, Green Silk – Best of Issue, Gold Wake Press, Whistling Shade and Featured Poet in Up the Staircase. Upcoming: The Clearfield Review, Contemporary American Poetry, Counterexample Poetry. She is listed in IMBD and Turner Classic Movies for her roles in Stephan’s Silver Bell and Guns on the Clackamas. She played a waitress on All MY Children.
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