NANETTE RAYMAN - POEMS

Nanette Rayman, author of poetry books, Shana Linda Pretty Pretty,  Project: Butterflies, Foothills Publishing, two-time Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, winner Glass Woman Prize for prose. Publications include The Worcester Review, Sugar House Review (poem mentioned at newpages.com), Stirring's Steamiest Six, gargoyle, Berkeley Fiction Review, Editor's Pick for prose at Green Silk Journal, chaparral, Pedestal, ditch, Wilderness House Literary Review, decomp, Contemporary American Voices, featured poet at Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rain, Poetry & Disaster Society, Pedestal, DMQ, carte blanche, Oranges & Sardines, sundog , Melusine. Latest: Writing in a Woman’s Voice.

​unholy, Battle

​A pitiful dress drifted over a street the color of iron mascara
Petunia pink as candy ripping when reaching a boot
Into which a ruffle dissolved and cried underfoot.
And mosquitoes swarmed the Honey Vanilla body spray left on cotton.
 
Booking fast, a woman trying to leave the hood where a mob
Had taken her for wearing something immodest.
There are men who dream women as body parts
Part of themselves or their tents where tickets are hoarded
 
In subdivisions for thighs, breasts, vaginas and legs. That the breast
Under petunia cotton is a threat to your control is not my problem.
Why has the armour of pink unleashed your G-d direction to hurt
Me instead of love me as a complete and holy magnolia?
 
Officious ones raping milky orbs indifferent and unholy
You fail to see I am Woman, I am Dance. I am Free. Lust’s
Clench is channeled by some men into love and family
A dash of desire for long life. For G-d.
My breasts and my legs are beautifully created by G-d’s
 
Promise to let me love. Again, you’re off
Your Mount and black orchid serpents won’t get me--
On this street the size of breasts walk if they want to, go
Pray something holy, fly like a new-fangled Othello—in the South
Bronx the freedom is in every woman.
 

maple bark and mystical karma 
​

​the weeds inflate near the buggy tree
the lying biddies & the bark pace near dead grass
it’s not the green or striped bark of maple, akin to eye-music
flames that curl and Molotov the forest as the moon eyes
the sound of biddies lying, it’s plain mouse bark like a cricket-
eyed biddy finding her way near me to stare down her prey
 
with little cricket beads of sweat popping her face, she rushes
down the hall to where I live and in a space between door and wall
inserts a sharp slice of bark, a mound of ants and a note—with tongs
I remove the gift and throw it in the dumpster where she meets me
without speaking I apply more juicy lilac lipstick and sneer.
I could take you down—you—I won’t bother.
sweat hurries down her face—tough front wings are leathery,
she chirps something as she rubs her wings together, the bark
back over there has turned a scorching red

angel
​

​While my lover
my husband my friend
took two buses at night
with no good connections
to visit me as I lay unconscious
my arm not an arm
hit and run over by a meth head
an angel in a yellow sundress & very stylish bob
said:
“Come back to earth.”
I know I said:
“No. I like the clouds.”
 
When I told him this
the next day he said:
“You were in and out—you never
said one word.”

cheap carnival
​

​right near recherché ribaldry of the biddies,
buttercups and pansies wave and wink
at me, the object of the biddies’ lies and envy.
 
I’ve long ago surrendered to the notion that ugly green
women have ruined me & continue to spew lies. I long ago
learned to walk tall, laugh & wear a South Bronx
face like a bodega gangbanger infested & infected with gunflash.
 
what I didn’t know back when is what I know now—women
in cheap carnival have no entrée if a mother had been
a mother and salted me away, saved and secured and
surrounded me when it mattered. There, by the pansies, a lame,
ulcerated cricket-faced liar, whispers to red-head-to-toe-- seriously,
who wears red shoes with a red skirt?—splinted up like a wan anemic
dahlia. They need a fuse, sending them dropkicked and bursting
with dripping red confetti. 
 
I don’t anger anymore. I learned by hit and miss. I learned only stars
are envied, even stars never given their chance to be
stars.  Better to keep them guessing, heads
erupting. Red and Splinted are without
talent and, plain. The women are blue now. They wanted
a sad mad response. I am toxiferous. The biddies’ bodies
are corrupting, falling, they hate the sound of toxiferous as
they hate the punishment everlastingly given.

Revolution/Iran/WOMAN
​

​Men soil Women when they veil them and asphyxiate them up to their eyelashes--
so the brave woman threw off her hijab, unafraid of the lash,
liberty-hipped & alive & pretty birds walked her to the center of the world.
Her chains her cage her coop her submission lost molecules when the air
moaned in rapture & the Woman swayed her feminine wiles over
the broken limb of Iran, bark scraping her milk-thighs until--
she reaches the Persian Gulf bedded to the littoral Gulf
of Oman, thighs dancing willows, birthing clean new women.