Jennifer Martelli
​

By August

they’re already hanging witch
dolls from the eaves and the ledges
of the homes in Salem

and from the windows of shops where I buy
local goods: waxy combs, balms,
and a small owl

candle with a long wick. A dragonfly
leads me past a hedgerow
of autumn olives. August

yields her sun low, lower,
lower each day. I curve
into the fall, lick the parts that hurt

most, my wounded willow bark, my
animal skin. Last night, in a dream, this:
I cradled a corn cob doll to me,

urged it to nurse the nothing that’s left,
became less sad, less of a conduit.
Can I deconstruct an asexual life

and call this home? Can I not allow
touch and still love?
Come morning, I pondered the exclusion

of queen bees in fall. My hair
was a willow nest of cold blue eggs
and I could smell the wine from the small

apples that fell, rotten and bruised,
to the ground below my window.
All night, I’d simmered on low

shimmery citrus rinds--
a tea I could drink, a balm
boiled down. Come, mourning, take

the inch of light: orbit wider farther
away. My back arcs into place. Out back,
tomatoes choke, thick on their vines. At last,

the pepper plants have turned deep purple. Fall
curves here, a pelted thing, amber.
You have to see it, the light.

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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, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Review, and elsewhere. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow and co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.