MARGUERITE MARIA RIVAS - POEMS

A native New Yorker, Marguerite María Rivas’s writing has been published nationally and internationally. She is an Associate Professor who teaches women’s literature and creative writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her second full-length volume of poetry is forthcoming in 2020. She is the Poet Laureate of the Borough of Staten Island, NYC.

​Inheritance

Poets long ago looked up at the night
sky and stared stars into dreams and knew
not if they were dreaming or witnessing 
a celestial pageant as they wove 
desire and fear into stories and songs,
lay dream-heavy heads on beds of grass
or craned necks deep inside earthen wells
to see visions hovering above lonesome heads.

Yet I think those ancestors, whether poets in clay,
in song, or in pigment, saw far beyond
those bewildering moments of dream/reality
as they plodded across continents
to a lucent future filled with progeny 
who’d tell their stories and sing their night songs.

​

UNTITLED

                                 This morning
                                   transported
by sudden joy                             I knew I must
write a poem about this         wondrous thing,
                                     but tonight
I’ve forgotten                                just
what was worth                          remembering.
Odd numbers’                             grace as
                                      they fall. 

​

AMPLITUDE
​

The radiator hisses. I can hear it.
If I take my hearing aids out, it will stop.
I fell asleep with them in this afternoon--
heard the pinging of raindrops on an awning.

Having forgotten this familiar music,
I lay shocked, sighed, burrowed beneath the blanket,
but soon remembered the high cost of hearing.
I plucked fragile hearing aids out, turned them off, 
packed them away; syncopated music died.
The radiator silenced, I soon returned
to a muted world alone.

​

Fragment on the Wall of Her Jail Cell                 
​                                                   March 1861
​

How do I forget
spring planets once bewitched me
into loving you?

​