Nanette Rayman
Corpse Faces, Honey
Because here, this Fort Apache, this need for asafetida— Because here no landlocked bluebells, no rodeo, no smoking in bars to mark time, no smoking gun except for the bodies pulled off the pavement, except for the mouths, which keep railing over the bodies, I look out the window whenever I can. More derring-do than usual, the dirt and the noise take dirt and noise into themselves, as if by nosing in it they could cancel each other out, or spoiling for a fight in flight carpenter bees, mandibles jawing, locked in corpse faces, honey. begin to let things out of control. Shots. Ambulance. Violate lights. Galenicals. and I see it’s not all brume— where the sky bends down there’s silhouette, where the lone violet flags in rain there’s flag and pistils and a soaring white gull turns toward me like another life.
Nanette Rayman, winner of the first Glass Woman Prize for fiction/nonfiction, author of two poetry books, Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies (Foothills Publishing), has work included in Best of the Net Anthology 2007 and Dzance Best of the Web 2010. Publications include: Rain, Poetry and Disaster Society, MadHat, Berkeley Fiction Review, Oranges & Sardines, gargoyle, carte blanche, Sugar House Review and Up the Staircase Quarterly.
