Sometimes, when my joints pop, a woman appears and wants to talk to me.
No matter how carefully l move, these women want to use their tongues.
We all know that the dead can’t speak, but some can shake rice in a tin sieve.
A poet told me the first tambourine was formed in Italian groves
where women danced while cleaning rice and later, where women conjured ghosts.
I was ashamed to say I swapped my father’s name for my husband’s name:
the vowels so round at the end, they slipped into my smooth white sockets.
No matter how far back I searched, the names were father’s names—thick as guns.
If I owned a gun, it would be pearl, and cold, so shiny, it looked wet.
Its sound would sound more like air sucked out of small pink lungs, or finger snaps.
No matter how far back I travelled—Hanover Street, Avellino—
I ended up with a silver axe, a hammer, a boy, a blacksmith:
My father was an Italian man. So are my husband and my son.
No matter how I move now, women pop out of me and they sound like guns.
Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, Solstice Literary Magazine (finalist, summer poetry contest, 2020), Thrush, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), Poetry, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.
