Nanette Rayman

I Paid for Feathers Burn with love young better than safe. Hurl your hearts bellringer. The moon stops for no one, shut that tongue— orbs look away when old comes. You’ll be sorry if love keeps you imprisoned, tucked between buttress roots. Eyes of a bird facing the wings, eyes leaking where actresses and writers become arms asleep and awake convinced their grounded footprints have passed here, petrified before in a forest of their own making. The wife’s arms fill with laundered trees and lavender dishes, girl, that doesn’t make headlines. Black eyes footnotes. Water is heard in the sighing. Safe makes you dust, stupor’s stupor, burning flickers as someone in the abject of all empty nights— without you realizing, you are free, someone still open to surpassing the sorrow of her night. I thought I wanted it both ways. Even birds heard what they say in the lilywhite papers: safe is never glee frenzy; it’s cracked up to be a chute to wound you, anyway. There are so many handprints all over my heart where I paid for feathers. Good & Pretty Wives Bleed A Lot Protean pasta this evening. Early October sunset gastronome color dubbed mouth. Angel. Gloss. White hair. Snapped stench. Poured down the wall in phony sangfroid curvatures, breasts sluiced oranges. not storebought. Bruised. Fault earthquake faked that’ll show him. Dead bolt door angel stay back, knock. 1-800-799-SAFE Mariska Hagerty scaling the web Joyful Heart had no elbow. Fingernails fractioned spatchcock. Grilled. Harm. Foul. What? No good cop/bad cop? Interpolate, man! Dahlias necklaced despite adept truss of hands. Tens of tens. Married facet knits G-d’s vims to seamless entity. One. Souvenir. After dead-blade cop eyes go, hair. The hyphen of acedia between his lips. He says: I never touched you. What better film eddies the eyes. The soul’s frontispieces ornately dull, plum-blooded with wasted seed. October obeisance drugs itself to the floor. And now my thoughts deprive me of doors to the world to come. Tuckered breasts railing on railings transpontine. Throat constrict flowery cross world. The hot hum of Vanda snapped shut. Could I comb my hair care & fully, could I close knit my tender fallopian, filled with loneliness, to find angels trashed? Neck snowed with what didn’t last? That I married a snake, rodeo lash wicked enough skulking at the slit— Split. Di·vor·cée—the ·cée of see or sea, won’t bathe beyond the wound. The Word. I dream he shoots me blank on point in the recess of dead Chessed. Woman alone better than hollow point. Tulsa On the flat road up from the Marriott a woman paroxysms on conceit like some updated parched Saturday Night Live church lady inhaling self-righteous snake-oil. Trees fenced off from the sidewalk, impotent to give shade left late into autumn yield to their cages. Lavender lace sweater tied around my waist, caliente October. Antediluvian air made of uneasy transplanted woman walking, a thing people do—pink communist flowers all the same to you, ditto flowers gone floppy and brittle as calcium- deficient fingernails. I needed too much from this air of dead flowers—that they hold out promise or have the decency to pretend and just pose. Sweetheart lady in the dull blue car, I would never go against the right of way, but you see, you saw me, you see-only-me as you ram and I gasp and you ram harder and I fly like a ballerina in adagio, a song crumpled out into the sun to scatter. Darling cop, I pull my ear, sounds, gauche in their landing, break my drum. What did you say? Oh, you don’t want my statement? My heart droops on the rammer kept at bay. Days later, I spastically push the thin blue line, baby steps, giant footprints way beyond the sound. The only hand that can cease my mouth smokes, please stop, sweet hand. The rotten Tulsa PD, foreign as chicken-fried steak, sings to me, Bitch! No report. False report. Civic Center melee, a song that calls for me, spasms while the thirsty blue-car lady is eating through me. Listen to the nusach of the dying unharnessed every night, lonely overdue hospital bills spilling over my muscled lace arms. Let me abscond now. If I knew Tulsa would be this dismal, I would have gone sooner. Unassigned land crawls through sinkholes they tell me drain rainwater. I have no song for I came after the land-runs. Like flying off the hood of a dull blue car, I have no more doubts about water or Tulsa when early autumn sinks to late December, when the prison wall gall stinks like dirty cops, when manure & forlorn sound erases sight to the invisible world where scrims are the scene and curtains of flight await. Nanette Rayman is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for writing. She has two poetry books published: Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies from Foothills Publishing. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, she has published in The Worcester Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, gargoyle, Pedestal, magnolia, Oranges & Sardines, up the staircase featured writer, Red Ochre Literature, frigg, Stirring’s Steamiest Six, carte blanche, Wilderness House Literary Review, deComp, grasslilmb, Arsenic Lobster, Prick of the Spindle, Carousel and Sugar House Review where her poem, One Potato, Two, was mentioned in Newpages.com. A story was included in DZANC Books Best of the Web 2010 and a poem, “Shoes” was included in Best of the Net Anthology 2007. Her poem, “hope” was nominated for Best of the Net Anthology by Glass Journal. A portion of a one act play she wrote was performed for her in Israel in 2013. She attended Circle in the Square Theatre School and the New School. She has performed in many off off Broadway shows.