Jennifer Martelli
I Don’t Have It, Do You?
—Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, 1982
Deep into coronavirus’s sway, I drive through the rain to my childhood home—
I am safe in my car with my husband and my son.
There was a man who joked about death and then he died of Alzheimer’s.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s and so there is no God.
That man joked for three years: jokes about fairies and kissing: things he believed
made a man less of a man, things he believed made a man a woman.
My mother forgot everything but her fear and so there is no justice.
The new owners put a stone façade over part of the old house: tonal colors my mother
would have liked. Big blocks of fake rock.
(Lentivirus: long incubation. Lent: long days. Lent: it shall be returned.)
I stay awake until first pearl light. The whole world has been cancelled and so there is no time.
—Submitted on
Jennifer Martelli is the author of In the Year of Ferraro (Nixes Mate Books, 2020), My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), After Bird (Grey Book Press, 2017), and The Uncanny Valley (Big Table Publishing Company, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Rise Up Review, Superstition Review, Grimoire, Glass, and other journals. Martelli is poetry co-editor of Mom Egg Review. She co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Boston Literary Series. Online at jennmartelli.com
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