Jennifer Martelli
I grew up the middle of three girls in an first-generation Italian-Irish family; disobedience was not encouraged. My father, politics, the Church: my rebellion had to be covert, in the shadows of a shelf, in the land of cats.
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Supper During Watergate
My father sat at the head of the table, dusky as Nixon’s five o’clock shadow--he glared
at my older sister who would not look at him, would not look up or pull
her straight black hair away from her face (I had yet to give up my
stretchy headbands, and the baby was still in pig tails then). Supper during Watergate
was not much different than any other supper, except that one night I hid
the microphone of a cassette tape player between the copper mugs
my mother lined on the shelf,
cups so unsafe to drink from that the oxide
leached into the fronds of the spider ferns she planted. She hung
the copper tray above the dinner table and it glowed like a penny tossed
down a well.
In Korea, it is believed that ghosts
will come to the sound of chopsticks clicking porcelain bowls, they are so
hungry, they will just mill around, waiting. They will come even if
they hear your teeth click.
That was the sound we heard
when I played the tape back before dessert: and the hum of the tape
circling and the sound of the hearings from the television in the other room.
My father loved the President then as I love the President now.
He felt victimized as Nixon and when he got up without
asking to be excused he spilt his water all over the table: the knots
in the wood grew long under the drops and they looked to me like
sad faces. My mother, sweet and reaching as Rose Mary Wood, stretched
across to wipe up the mess. It’s Watergate, she said. She said
I shouldn’t upset him even more.
The Veiled Women
walking along Broadway from the bakery and
sometimes, the new burka store, got my father nervous.
I’d drive him by the Beach, by
St. Theresa’s: well, I won’t be going there anymore, he’d point,
screwed by God, by my mother’s Alzheimer’s, his cancer: he was going to die and
my mother wouldn’t know. The Church sold off St. Theresa’s
to pay for legal fees and the stone cross was pulled down like the statue of Saddam Hussein--
roped and toppled. They glued a crescent moon
to the terra cotta brick and now it’s something else.
A woman waits out front, so veiled all I see are her eyes, like my own black coon cat.
Her eyes don’t scare me, though: if you live here long enough,
no one will meet your gaze. My father hated cats, too. A man may die
once he has married three daughters off, Rumi said. My two sisters and I
feed our cats til they’re fat. My own cat’s fur grows long
and she sits waiting, covered and purring, her eyes
green or golden, kissing me with her eyes, warm and plump under fur that covers her
like a black niqab.
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Jennifer Martelli’s chapbook, Apostrophe, was published in 2011 by Big Table Publishing Company. Most recently, her work has appeared in Wherewithal, Hermeneutic Chaos, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and The Apeiron Review. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry and a Pushcart nominee. She is an associate editor for The Compassion Project: An Anthology and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. www.jennifermartelli.com