Little Boat

for Gretchen Whitmer

Today my friends and I eat sugar donuts,

drink strong black coffee, map out

the small politics of our seaside town where

everything has an ocean theme: gold cods nailed

to mailboxes and banks and dentist offices—

you’ve seen it, that look. The town was carved out

of rock before there even was these United States.

The freshwater pond in the middle of town

is named for a woman hanged by her neck

for sundry acts of witchcraft. We decide a slate

and strategy for the fall. I’m so headachey from

this wet air here, from the two white men—

and you’ve seen this before—deemed too dumb

to kidnap a woman, row her out

in a little boat, zip tie her, put her on trial, and find

her guilty. Have one person go to her house, knock

on the door and when she answers it,

cap her. This land is mannish-

boy and cruel. The air heavy and banal: it’s been

raining off and on like a rusty nuisance of a period

that just won’t end. The bitch needs to go.

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.