Nanette Rayman Rivera
we will speak
in this city spilling
over with cockroaches and rules, the smell
...................of blackmold and riverteeth
...................surpasses the free fragrance of speech
in a world written on a tripwire,
see the lonely, the misplaced, the impecunious
...................writhing to be heard. grounded in a raintight
...................vat, they will rise one day and break
the sound barrier. they will corral the cronies
into small peripheries, move 'em out- rawhide.
...................help. now they are drowning. and I
...................am one of them, trying to breathe
my lungs into poetry. Is silence a coda for madness?
validation something for the birds? somewhere
...................beyond sound, beyond this overcurrent, overload,
...................megaohmmeter, we will speak. all those
fallen away buttons, opening bodies.
Nanette Rayman Rivera, two-time Pushcart Nominee for non-fiction and poetry, is the author of the poetry collection, Project: Butterflies by Foothills Publishing and the chapbook, alegrias, by Lopside Press. She is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction and has poetry on Best of the Net 2007. Her story, Puhi Paka, was best of issue in Greensilk Journal. Other publications include The Worcester Review, Carousel, Carve, The Berkeley Fiction Review, ditch, Prick of the Spindle, The Wilderness Review, Pebble Lake Review, Mannequin Envy, Dirty Napkin, MiPOesias, Pedestal, Lily, Wheelhouse, Stirring, Snow Monkey, Wicked Alice, Tipton Poetry Journal, Dragonfire, Arsenic Lobster, Three Candles, Velvet Avalanche Anthology, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Red River Review, Flashquake, A Little Poetry, DMQ Review, Her Circle, grasslimb, Barnwood, and Chantarelle's Notebook. Upcoming: The Blue Jew Yorker. She is shopping her memoir around to agents, a true story of what really goes on in the New York City's homeless, welfare, food stamp and public housing system. She graduated from The New School University.
(author retains copyright)
