Martha Silano

Dear Sei Shonagon,

​You say aster, say crane’s bill, say lavender,
but not iris. I say reticulated, bearded.

You say a sword with decorated scabbard.
I say I am that wind on the corner of K and New York,

but all our disappointments fit on a single shelf,
but both of us are drawn to a small wooden bench.

Delayed Lyft, forgetting to knot the end
of the thread: you set your alarm to radio,

awaken to static, hit reply-all by mistake,
talk and talk to someone asleep

while Siri leads me to a cul de sac, barks
proceed to the route. We shoot arrows

in the wrong directions; in a crowded room
our child blurts fuck! I’m thankful for what

you taught me: no one should be groped
while wearing a blue-jean gown, to be told

you weren’t hired to be a secretary; no one turns
a girl into a grab bag, moves on her like a bitch.

---

If an iron fence is a paragraph,

​then a sentence is my tenth grade biology teacher’s smile, the patchy black  beard attempting to cover the acne of his youth. None of us had been to Selma, but in his classroom we were his mama’s collards and buttery grits, each of us
gifted a middle name, Mae, some small sense of growing up in the South, though not a word about being black in a mostly white town. If the fence is a part, his smile is a piece of that part, then the correct answer on the test he’s about to give  is the opposite of We shall overcome, the road to success pretending a dark- skinned teacher was nothing novel in Metuchen in 1976.

Such a messy lab! Closets cluttered with dusty, unlabeled jars. Ungainly worms, fetal pigs floating in formaldehyde. It hardly seemed possible—all that inherited toxicity, so many potential explosions, bonafide cross-bone warnings on coffee- colored jars. Calves brains, no less. Glass shards showering our desks on Grove
Ave. just past the trestle bridge oozing tar on hot afternoons, a rare patch of  woods, tadpoles languidly swimming in small pools along the tracks. Thirteen years of public schooling, and I’m ashamed how little I know of The Civil War, its win/lose/win/lose/win/lose course. If an iron fence is anything, it ends with a who
sat on a swinging gate, a which kept the truth from silently slipping  in.

--
Martha Silano’s books include Reckless Lovely, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception and, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. Martha edits the Seattle-based journal, Crab Creek Review, and teaches at Bellevue College.