truck driver beauty

needing morality and purpose is not a sin.
Today that would translate as: alive like a rock-face
and dead like a landslide. Limitless gray of pigeons.
It’s only a way of being who I really am,
though it was horrific to tuck down as dormant doormat-girl
and the landlord—that’s the rent, baby—holding my breath
until breath clicklocked my lips. Shoved into the burgundy
Impala by a mother who would never inspire homesickness
and dropped off at an orange-brick rooming house full of bad men.

To have lived in another time, mother as black swan would be
taken to task in the street, neighbor-mothers rushing her so
quickly she’d be mistaken for unpaved tar. Another time,
and I would have managed the street monarchies.
I tell myself that no woman should imprison the beauty
of another, or constrain her rose fragrance, pulling at
her freedom like a thousand threads. Let me be, burst, blossom,
become, bleed if struck, be-gone to some wind-felt garden
where real angels knock down stone angels.

I tell myself that I’m not woman-as performance hidden
dance-work shooed away like a lugubrious bird. I’m festival
imbued with rose-smelling rain, strong as defiant trees branching
into fog. Woman as lambent sky arching her hip to the side.
I would rather have not removed my lips, made them into prideful
bracelets, adhesives to skin but pain unspoken speaks through flesh.

A rabbi said we should carry one piece of paper in one pocket, a piece
in the other—one states our own certain mission only we are able to
perform on this earth, one to remind us that we are ashes and dust.

I have chosen to smoke cigarettes always.
I’m inclined to let smoke swirl like confetti in my mouth.
Truck-driver beauty, fallen angel, beautiful beast
who tried hard at her mission and failed, with no blanket
to smother memory of a beautiful husband, crying by a spirit-lamp.

I once had a friend who called me angel with truck-driver mouth—

Slanting through the ghostly pathway, ramming head-on with
the flash of hands-up surrender, that largest sin taught me to moan
when he went missing, who knows if I’d made one last attempt to get
him help for his tortuous addiction, oh! —if he’d had settled
down, breathed and collided sweet against my breasts.
I catch the sulfur scent of regret.

How moral I was—

your eyes. you. me. forever

your eyes, cherry trees outside my window
stars
are your eyes
how unnerving
are your eyes
they could rearrange sky

your eyes, two jolts against death
eyes of the hourglass body of sky

your eyes a kind of repair beneath heaven

how sexy
are your eyes
only a spring breeze breezes like this
your eyes
whisper

that way your hazel brown
allongés with my chocolate brown
in this southeastern small city roulette
something familiar from another
life, your eyes
truly exquisite

are your eyes, of the morning breezes
the light, the dark, hazel about to faint
in the trees as they breeze

only salty summer summers like this
summer speaks and her voice reverberates
into the cluttered woods
summer eyes me
but who eyes me
there’s no one climbing out
of the woods
I’m here very alone
summer writes poems
summer has arms outreaching
into the gloaming ghazals.

*

there is no fleeing spice-scent of rainbow dancer phlox
creeping phlox eyes root right here in mulch
there’s no going back
probably your eyes spun out
of themselves
luxuriating in phlox
your lips which were mine
would tell me I am phlox
your eyes
air to my lungs
drifting away in darkness
your eyes
gunning it around summer
once upon a time your eyes
grabbed my sundress at the waist
eyes as hands harsh on me
not too
I heard summer crowding
so eager
for your eyes.

once upon a time, a husband told this to his wife:
I will always save you.
your eyes have stopped
knocking
this year, sitting alone by phlox and garbled trees
I hear all he once saved me from
sirens and minefields of other eyes
your eyes
made me free
nobody’s prey
this year, I feel leaves heaving
your eyes there
our bodies racing
again
warm fragrant air
nothing to fear
night, summer night
your eyes
me, gypsy clanging bells
your eyes glistening—saved?
I pray
your eyes will break
back into my world.
This world—

weeping willow lips

The body that bears my name tramples on dewed grass,

telling the weeping willows that the spine of a setting sun

is nothing compared to the umbilical cord that tied you to me

in beauty in your aroma a style of mint under heaven

the body with a name that sits alive beneath a weeping willow

has breasts of pure pink partway to sky-blue. My lips turn

honey to shame; they need no collagen and they’ve kissed

only a few. Your lips are my shelter—gimme, says you, but

your lips are missing. You the sad fire who kissed me and I fell

on the lower Manhattan bench. My body became a river inside

its curves and threw away the bull near Wall Street. You stag

forever You who turned me back teenage I live for You who won’t

return, I sit with my lips and my breasts and my navel-turned other

than song, I sit écarté, perpendicular to the willow, spellbound.

Spilled lips, lips for the wife, lips against drunk drivers, lips on a goat gazing

back at me. Lips pink and blistered and needy. Bloody lips as rivers, lips go

go to sleep, lips missing in lilac, lips cut on a barbed wire fence, lips

against the crack pipe, aluminum lips, lips come back, lips as language

lapping willows-weeping, cake lips in grimmest night, geeking sweet lips

still tasting me—come back. Lips gone missing. Husband gone missing.

Swathes of burns on Lips. Paranoid lips. Stop being missing. How dark the

flesh of the night is without the crest of the sea and your lips gone-missing—

I sigh like a bird gone sleeping. Fancy sucking-sweet dream red of your lips.

Author’s Biography

Nanette Rayman-Rivera, author of books—Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies, is a two-time Pushcart nominee, winner of Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, winner Glass Woman Prize. Sugar House Review, The Worcester Review, Wilderness House, Sundog, Up the Staircase, Berkeley Fiction Review, Pedestal, DMQ, Sundog, Seventh Wave, Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Editor’s Pick Green Silk. Recent: Collidescope Journal, Poetry SuperHighway. Upcoming: carte blanche. She lives with her puppy, Layla.