They’ve already sent a mother who midwifed her daughter’s abortion to jail.
I don’t say this to my friends as we tour a colonial mansion. I’d ruin the day.
I’m angry all the time now, then rue my anger throughout the night.
The days are growing longer, though no warmer.
Cusp, I read that Cancer in women can manifest as loyalty or vengeance.
I climbed to the widow’s walk in a single line. This mansion’s old wood
could not sustain more than one of us at a time. I was afraid to stay
longer than a glance at the harbor’s pronged and calipered shape.
The widow’s portrait still hangs at the bottom of the stairs. She holds
a bounty of fruit in her gold skirt: purple grapes, a ripe peach, green pears.
These are her children, the docent says. The widow holds them right
where her uterus must be. She wears a mother of pearl choker, too.
Everything in this portrait is reflective. Cusp, June feels wrong, raw.
I’m not sure how to enter and live in your Cancerous house.
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, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, which was also shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com