Nanette Rayman Rivera is a writer and actress living in New York City and dreaming of living on a warm beach. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Worcester Review, Dragonfire, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Carousel, Wicked Alice, The Pebble Lake Review, andwerve, Barnwood, The Centrifugal Eye, Arsenic Lobster, Stirring, Flashquake, Pedestal, DMQ Review, Verse Libre, Erosha, Three Candles, Snow Monkey, Small Spiral Notebook, Carve Magazine, 5 Trope, Mindfire Renewed, Words and Pictures, Concrete Wolf, Rogue’s Scholars, remark, eye-rhyme, Central Avenue, Red River Review, Mannequin Envy, Underground Window, and many more. Upcoming: Jack, Poesia, A Little Poetry, Cezanne’s Carrot, Her Circle and Wanderings. Her first poetry collection, Stay the Lunatic Course will be published by Foothills Publishing later this year. She has performed in off-off Broadway plays and small parts on soap operas and independent film. She studied at The New England Shakespeare Festival, Circle in the Square and the Gene Frankel Studio. She graduated from The New School University.

 

Edna Pontellier Left at the Altar                   

Where's the lace from Latin's lariat?
Background thread unravels, the rain
changes quickly. She has to get that
she can stay dry, not run through it.

The exceedingly lucid exceptionally frail
pistols and stamens of lilies die near
the mallow roses and cast an O
to her mouth she hadn't expected

Lace-filled lips hold pins to cushion
the blow and the rain in stretched
shadows reiterates that milieued thread
is wed to the deflowered dress and seams

her choking worries the lamp and its wayward light
sends her into nods to the truth that he left
to symmetry a sinister weather
with the rain in dappled breaths all along
her spine as she runs through it and into the sea
 

Stifling                                 

In this amalgamate and anomalous light
she pleasures in her body, placing herself
near the hyacinth branches, naked before
the full-length mirror, fingers shelled

around the budding globe of her belly.
It is spring and the air and mulberry congeal
by symmetry, this woman lost in the cocoonery
of mothering and the dream of the archaic

fostering of silkworms retelling her own private
status, the spring outside and in posing as if
concentric within the other.  She read
that it begins with the minuscule pearly seeds
women pour into delicate hand-sewn sachets,

hands them snug to their corseted breasts.
Women as incubators, their bodies nurturing
those nascent silkworms, waiting for the first
shoots of l'amorie blanc to sprout, nourishment

assured.   Placed in their own cocoonery, the
roar of their munching like a hammering monsoon
amidst a shrunken, deciduous woodland, delicious
sound, the sound a mother loves to hear, the

sound of growth, expelling all effluence, raised
to an unalloyed sheerness, clear as a ready white grape.
And you, woman, mother for a full ten days, mother
who redeploys according to need, to nurture again,

your need safely hidden and tiptoeing through
the universe as the silkworms you've birthed
have faded to nothing, like blue sky for clouds.
Medicinal light of afternoon as you remove

the cocoons from brushwood ladders, as you
steam them so the butterflies won't burst
through their shells demolishing all the fragile
spun thread, because the thread is everything.
The reward you're expecting
never comes, but the stifling does.