Nanette Rayman Rivera
		what I want to say to Death
		I wanted to say, Death, baby— as my father might’ve said to me, If you leave out the 5th glass of wine to that Elijah—you could for me— at our Seder my mother, Rona Lee,  harrumphed, hated waste– see, I’m from a tamarack-thrust family at the end of a tote-that-barge mule, and cooped up with a hankering for Syphisus’s real feelings where mothers with donkey eyes give daughters much tsores in how-not-to-let-your-face-go-to-your-head though she’s a jealous and avenging G-d, and fathers, tied up in body-bags of married, cram their mouths lee-wayed with bagels & lox & Winstons taste good. Beside me, my Jose has blessed me with no bruises, speaks in his Spanish-Hebrew lilt, anxiously kneading an egg-white Cross in his hand - Aleinu as Ajeinu and I tried to lay my hands on his but the wait is killing me like the weight of the wait at some TempPositions office. 27 years from the last real job, when I’d eaten frosting alone in a cabbage-rose wallpapered rooming house popping a bottle of Tylenol, and I kept thinking, Be׳vakasha – בְּבַקָּשָׁה, G-d, no weigh-in, no questions about why I did it, recalling stories about some embryonic golem's omnipresent entry point -  is that me? To become god is merely to be free on this earth— This is so not the place, I guess, to quote Camus. For I’ve just missed the cross-point, the tipping over the garden to the boardwalk skyline. Days dressed and undressed in orchids, apples and commandments forgotten:  I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.  And so— Death sprung me.  I waited chain-link-side for Jose like one of those Caged women digesting a smoke who, with the patience of a biceped lifer in the exercise yard, silhouettes the big –house catafalque el muro, hoping Death ends the rock’s rolling back down. I go back home, supposedly happy that Jose is safe. Returning for one last look-see, I found it all flicked over, a cock-eyed billboard. The air clanked shut - like me if an eensy turn had been taken with my middle finger pointed at Saturn. The woman who looked just like me was gentle, said, You can’t go back; fate rules. I was not grateful for the dew-lagoon in her voice, like crushed ice chips in mouths hooked up to IVs, the new rain on hyacinth in crack pipes, the crushed apple and almond, sorrow-wafers on arid tongue, tears after years— Hurry! I can’t wait to take it fast into my residue.
		Nanette Rayman Rivera, two-time Pushcart Nominee for non-fiction and poetry, is the author of the poetry collection, Project: Butterflies by Foothills Publishing and the chapbook, alegrias, by Lopside Press.  She is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction and has poetry on Best of the Net 2007.  Her story, "Puhi Paka" was best of issue in Greensilk Journal.  Other publications include The Worcester Review, Carousel, Carve, The Berkeley Fiction Review, ditch, Prick of the Spindle, The Wilderness Review, Pebble Lake Review, Mannequin Envy, Dirty Napkin, MiPOesias, Pedestal, Lily, Wheelhouse, Stirring, Snow Monkey, Wicked Alice, Tipton Poetry Journal, Dragonfire, Arsenic Lobster, Three Candles, Velvet Avalanche Anthology, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Red River Review, Flashquake, A Little Poetry, DMQ Review, Her Circle, grasslimb, Barnwood, and Chantarelle’s Notebook.  She is shopping her memoir around to agents, a true story of what really goes on in the New York City’s homeless, welfare, food stamp and public housing system.  She graduated from The New School University.
		© Nanette Rayman Rivera All Rights Reserved