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| marie nanette rivera |  | 1. Portrait of Pink Flamingos above a dead girl’s body. A time when it rained all the time, all the time. A child I could not give him, recalling the high summer sun as it monographed our room. He knew my thighs that replicated themselves, rain-breeding between my mourning. Tell those flamingos to build one of those volcanic shaped nests, lest he also dies from the breach between sorrow and swollen pink legs. Tell him to remember each high wire and breath, that made our cigarette-stained room feel like crop-milk sinuous through our skulls— the sun may be rehearsed, denoued in its place, dying to live. 2. flamingo frightned as me Deep in the sky, in the path of plumage, in the apricot cloud-bodice torn open in crinkling there lies a bare arm of daylight. It’s grail. It bubbles. It’s mikvah— vulnerable and sweet as a small shaved head. My life, in its whole, too much of it, has been beauty in tunnels spread around. My fury never forced any fountains out through the pores of my flesh. How sad exile, diaspora and apples for a free spirit like me. Seventeen when I was dropped through the mail slot by my nose. Street, scrotum, cherries, and a bowl of birds balloon headily on concrete. And always a murderous cake baked by sun lay waiting in the stew— denial blood dried under fingernails turns flat out fungus now So these nights I know a pink flamingo is as frightened as me. Such affliction I only now realize. Even if I were a sunbird there’s no going back. You offered no honey to these feathers I don even those few seconds I hungered for you. 3. manhattan, kansas I come to the window with nicotine curtains, fancy seeing doppelganger-me seeing an archetier, loaf of bow rosin, ginger wound scarlet over horse hair. I tell you it shouldn’t end like this, not for my solvent bowed lips, but because I imagined I’d play the violin. This must be a dream, rapacious red scrawled on medicine mirror bastardly hung over dolly porcelain sink: help—soon I’ll be homeless, and the homeless can do what the dead do. Dart into your world in a hum of whore-cloth; we come pretty educated swan-women, not mute, clicking our heels in unison to Manhattan, Kansas. In the moldy carpet then mirror then concrete in which the hell O—please let me stay but see the marshal comes see what he’ll do is meticulous like something a lip-print has held, or a lip has been used for a latitude I need one of those now I have no safeguards leave only my lip no trace else out the window but see the real me in the arms of the archetier. | |
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