Dear Kamala Harris,
For weeks now, before the election, wildfires poisoned the air on the North Shore.
One night, I left the window above my deep stainless farmer’s sink cracked open,
and the cat—whose ancient instinct is to run from what could kill it—hid all night.
I saw a nimbus of smoke refracting off the lamplight and the glow of the television,
where I was watching you speak with such surety, I too, believed.
I’m not saying clearly what it is I need to say. Are you tired from your work up in smoke?
No one is sure why or how these fires started or what it is they’re burning: beachgrass, dune-
grass, witchgrass, tires, maybe garbage bags or rose hips that grow thick along the coast here.
What a fall! Warm and dry, cool and dry. The winds blow red leaves that scrape the pitch.
On one hand, there’s fire from far away that travels on this driest wind that turns everything into
kindling, on the other, there are animals who know smoke, how it blows, what it obscures.
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.
The Marbled Sigh 