Pox

I texted my sister, I’m always angry now.  
I’m the copper pot boiling over on the small  
front stove burner, my least favorite. No one talks  
about favorite burners, though: how bone 
broth or thick gravy simmers perfectly across 
its own heat on the big back left one. Thanksgiving  
will be smaller this year. Fever or money or 
anger keeps folks away: even smallpox is back.  
I don’t ask who will mash those gold  
russets. We’ve always lived north of Boston,  
at the mouth of the tunnel, the neck 
of the bridge, under the shadow of the airplanes  
and the giant statue of Mary. On the other end, 
all the way down to the hook of the Cape,  
there are bogs and bogs of cranberries: red 
ponds moving, deep in their red, a color 
unlike anything but cranberry. Plymouth 
Rock sits in a white stone pit, guarded by  
wrought iron fencing with no latch to enter.  
Each century, the rock grows more small and 
more cold. They say no one ate turkey 
back then. They ate onions, carrots, waterfowl,  
eel. They breathed lungfuls of god and rage  
and pox. They ate without forks.  

Ceruse 

The Globe’s horoscope tells me to avoid abstract concepts,  
to avoid half-truths, to change my hair, to examine  
asexuality. The moon will rise at 4:09 pm today. A crown  

of autumnal planets will have risen by then, too. I watch the end  
of Elizabeth, when Cate Blanchett has her ladies- 
in-waiting shear her hair to the scalp, all bald, paint her 

with lead. Kat, she says to the weeping girl, I am a virgin 
again. It took time to do this: the scissors dull, 
the toxic lead and vinegar to make 

ceruse, crushed with a pestle in a stone 
cup. The Globe’s horoscope warns me, 
hunker down. I have all this time to watch 

my plants dry up: the vines with the old nightshades 
in pots out back, the mums and cosmos, 
even my one succulent. I had the idea 

of growing things. My lucky rubber plant’s skeleton 
is showing its leaves, bone-light 
green and lunar. Someone out there is angry with me. 

My horoscope says tonight, the moon isn’t good: 
don’t reciprocate, don’t respond to correspondence.  

JENNIFER MARTELLI

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.