Marguerite Maria Rivas hails from emerald bays, green forest and the soil of many cultures. Trace further back and you'll find she has Peruvian roots.

Some call her the de facto poet laureate of her hometown, Staten Island. 

Additionally, she comes from the worlds of academia and Women's Liberation. In the mid-nineties she hung out at the Cargo Cafe , becoming poetic kin with the likes of  Wil Wynn and Robert Levine.

Of late she has ventured off to Manhattan, performing at places like The Bowery Poetry Club, Performance Space 122, ETG Neighborhood Stage, and Theater for the New City.

An English lecturer at the City University of New York (BMCC), Dr. Rivas specializes in Latino/a poetry, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams. (Bardel)

Juan de Pareja and I

 

were lovers when I was but a girl

of twelve.

One early autumn dusk

idling time at the Met,

I wandered into the Velázquez room

where I felt a pain with the palpitation

of my girlish heart.

 

Struck amazed

at those sable eyes,

I bled fat drops

on the floor before him.

 

With a joint in my pocket at seventeen,

I returned.

"We'll smoke the fragrance of love

in a loft on Hudson Street

Juan, mi alma."

 

His eyes glistened from the

brush strokes of his master,

not for me,

"Not yet, mija."

 

So I went to college and studied art:

Caravaggio, Monet, Rembrandt, Corot,

Pollock, Pointillism, and Abstract Expressionism,

searching for some way to liberate Juan de Pareja

from the canvas of Velázquez.

 

Then did time in an uptown gallery,

a go-for girl fetching grilled

Cubans, fancy yogurt,

and framing materials,

until one day—a job at the Met

where we lived

in that mansion-prison on Fifth Avenue

 

and watched the sun set from

the Temple of Dendur

at closing time.

 

When nobody was looking

he stepped out of the painting

and we took off our shoes

 

(I unlaced each of his boots

with my teeth and then bit

each ankle.)

 

to pad soft-foot through the vaults below the museum,

lifted the leaden sailcloth off Cupid and Psyche

and crept under them,

made love beneath the marble of Rodin,

 

yet still I could not liberate him—

me a tiny gallery girl,

and he a slave of the canvas

and prisoner of Velázquez, still.

 

 

B-2 Spirit Stealth (Excerpt)

 

You! You who are prescient.

You who are thinking of me right now

because you are sensitive and you are prescient and just

maybe you are, at this moment, craning your neck

searching the night sky and thinking, “Why?

Why do I scan the sky before I turn my lock?

Why do I scan the sky as I turn a corner?

Why do I look up before I hurry down subway stairs?

What stops me and forces me to look up in

anticipation of something unknown? ”

 

III

 

You! You will read this one day and know

that I, with my concealed heart of black, of beautiful black,

of a black that is a precious stone but not cold,

the kind of stone you carry in your breast pocket

or you clench in your hand, palming it and warming it

with the heat of your body, so it is not cold.

It is something you can count on.

My precious black heart is something you can bank on.