Nanette Rayman-Rivera
When I want to be
in Eretz Israel—
And the intermission,
the maybe-tomorrow that I felt everlasting,
the antipathetic,
the affirmative
action that made lightning rods
out of me,
after months in beige flatlands
the seam between the worlds
cracked and I ceased to be.
I become the intermission,
my intractable-alone affliction
hidden from imaginary eyewitnesses who seem so many
agape aliens—
No one to approach
who seems empathic,
I become unending,
the blood in my aorta in the dungeon of my breasts,
I can’t feel the air around my neck
with its apodictic starless midnights I feel
the aneroid wind in the clay of my chest I am
no longer human, no longer specter
the billows are done,
I am frozen. What long mantle of heat is over
the year of slit seams on the darkening highways
of two worlds?