Nanette Rayman Rivera

After We're Homeless Even lilacs become an omen I dread Of how they blossom on, petals that buckle up the fortress like gum-chewing guards against the winding down. I have learned to shrink myself like a voodoo head to exist as animal needing only food and water as my husband in the unmade bed sleeps believing he's found a home. His eyes are dragonflies finding whatever kind of knickknacks and heaven he prayed for, and still there are grains of the underworld in my body, a manhole in my heart falls open, you enter precisely between beats as I love you, I'm still not happy.   Final Light (previously published in Erosha and Velvet Avalanche Anthology) I got used to blotted fur of blue light, to hungry wasp-waist, no half and half in my coffee. I accept ducks gliding the ice-shelf by my river-bed and crepe violets staining my dress I can't go on without promise - a place to live I'll cut my wrists and bleed on pansies without a cigarette, a match and a new blue sundress to wear Apple smell of skin in plague-days scares me and tongues of rain on bird talons- those demons, and your gondolier eyes through which the final light appears But when you fit yourself soft into my cool vanda bone it smells of water of near-night gurgling in grass, of lilacs finding their mojo I'm a lily pad afloat in blue water you're pirating my meat to stave the absolute give us our daily bread rising, yes, the curve of your back, yes and when we move like snakes on mosaic I know there is no final light   Passed Over The instant the roles of Alma, Lady M. and Lady were seized from me, I knew I was meant to be another woman. The she who stole me separates and cracks like a coconut’s skull. Is ardent as Bell-Imperia’s pleadings. This photograph is fevered and young with Yardley lips, and I know that she is me in an epidemic of eyelet lace. My eyes call out toward something hidden beneath flaws. She stands there the way I used to stand: fingers over hilled hip If I could take her and hold her, then keep her like breath, I could rest and be actual. I could live in chance increments of beauty, live on the stage, not caring what happens next. It happens so fast, like the loss of light in electrical storms. I know my name, remember being someone before this. Like all who are passed over, the heart leaves a note: I’ve gone to hit upon myself. Everyone wanting her face in a dream so foul she fights like someone conjured up.   Heat She cannot dream her own face static with topiary shrubs, near hide-away maps above- ground branches deciduously coasting downward, darkening all they fall upon. He continues with learned dignity, trying to make her laugh, and she won’t. Because already he won't imagine anywhere else but her, with her fall from grace and shabby suitcase, heady arms, wild flowers, their damp hems dusty as hers. He's too unlike her to barter safety for her beauty, his hands ache from gripping her, his mouth parched from pleading: We’ll ease into the heat – just one night in a shelter. She teases with recapture of real heat: Let me ungrass the petite hearts of your hair, come roost your snapdragon eyes on mine. They’ve come to this parallel world as two larvae, now more than woman and man dreaming their origins. Stripped of all but birth and migration, they’re set free like fancy yellow butterflies. Two empty pockets touching at corner and thread.

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