Jennifer Martelli

Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

Still Life in First Grade, 1968

We tore shapes from thick construction paper: goldgreen, red. This is how we made a still life in first grade.
Our teacher took away our little round-top scissors, told us to use our fists to carefully rip shapes of fruit out from the paper. This made the objects move,she said, the rough edges made them look like they shook.
My pear was shaped like my mother.My apple was round as my father’s belly.
We taped our moving shapes onto the tile wall in the first-grade corridor of the A.C. Whelan School that fallafter the spring and summer assassinations.
We tore out apple and pear trees, too, though so few grew near where we lived and they were scaled too small to bear anything.
The trees were shaped like my sisters. They trembledbecause their boundaries were blurred and smearedwith paste from my small pot.
Everything we tore was glued on a tilt.Everything we tore was still life, but not.  

Extraction

I found a wisdom tooth in my sock drawer.I’d been palping soft knots: peds with holes, anklets, and one leg of fishnet tights. One leg only. Jade green.
This was the tooth they pulled by the three rootsand crown out of my left lower jaw.
I thought I’d kept it in that tiny blue plastic pirate’s chest,small enough to palm. But there it was: loose, yellowed with nicotine, coffee, spiced tea.
It lay in a nest of lonely unmatched socks, foolishly tucked and rolled together. The tooth was buffered, silent, hard.
Long ago, I loved a man who wore no socks, so I wore no socks. I stayed cold and dumb.
That’s the way I know how to love: to become the other,to curl them into me tight as a fist.
I thought I’d set this tooth in a goldbezel, wear it on my ring finger to keep me safe.

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