In memorium. Rest in beauty, poetry, & power, dear Jennifer Martelli. These poems, she said, were part of a manuscript inspired by Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria.
Stain
The blue ink bled onto my white bed sheets:
blue spreading through three layers of clean
cotton, deep as the thirsty bleached cloth
would allow. The rain must have ended
when I slept, and my felt-tip pen fell loose
between my legs, the soft nib all dried up
and emptied. And now, how will I ever fix
this mess? This tentacled blue. The sun
broke through the east windows and the hue,
violet. Ventricle blue. Look at all the words
I didn’t write. Not even my hands, splayed
wide, not both of them, could hide this stain.
Are we demons / or are we birds?
— Open Again, Thom Yorke
My grandmother forbade birds in her home—
not in a painting, not on a silk scarf, not on a tin of cocoa powder, not Dove soap, not on a sack of Birds’ Eye vegetables, barely even the ocular NBC peacock.
Last night, I woke again at 3:00 am, and thought of her long needle— how she could knit an afghan in one night while watching television, how she could make thick ropey braids that ran up and down the length of wool.
I’d fallen asleep with the TV on mute, its blue light surrounded me.
My east-facing window let in one star, a crescent moon.
And the sound of a bird calling at night.
What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?
I caused a friend’s pain, then comforted her? I told my father I would dance on his grave? I was fearful of my own children’s loneliness?
Things that fly in the dark aren’t always bats.
For some birds, the mockingbird, it’s safer to hunt at night.
Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Braving the Body Anthology, Verse Daily, Plume, Diode, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was also longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, also longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com