The Marbled Sigh

Revisitation

To dream between two and four a.m. is to be visited upon.

Last night, my grandma sent me a crescent moon dream:

I’d birthed a small crone, her lids heavy with blue eye-shadow.

I’ve been pregnant so many times, so many pools of blood,

so many deep cramps, and hooks, so many of those, too.

So many men fear what we birth and what we don’t.

Men’s imaginations will kill us, you know this is true.

In the dream, the crone-baby’s eyes stayed closed, 

too thin and weak to open with all that heavy make-up.

I was allowed to sleep for a long while after, and woke 

to the oak outside my bedroom, felled with a chainsaw. 

I’ll miss its shade, its forked branches thick against the sky. 

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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.