Two Poems After Jodi Colella, by Jennifer Martelli

It's In Front Of Us and We Can't See It, by Jodi Colella (USA) contemporary. Click image for artist site.

The Mother House

An ill-fitting web stretched over a mouth-sized hole bored into the back porch. Something lived
in hollow wood, stripped gray by the salt air. Forlorn web. A whole family gone by first frost. I
think I’ve always been alone in my own sweet way, always hungry: ate cold roast beef after
birthing my daughter, after my son, smoked that first cigarette, its tip orange, hot in the winter
night, right here, on this porch—me, steaming milk, signaling my compulsion to be outside 
of myself. Do you understand? Nothing fit after that or ever again. Not even me in my own
mossy cocoon of skin. This frail web barely stretched across the hole, to its splintery rim, its
​messy lips. Some poor thing long ago tried to home here, in my home.

Braided, by Jodi Colella (USA) contemporary. Click image for artist site.

Braid

Even in my unlit room at night, I could braid /my hair so quickly, so tight, the plait would lie / 
still as a snake down my spine. An atheist //

now, I do miss how God could grab me / by that woven hank, pull my head back / on its neck
bones until my mouth opened wide, //

and all that escaped was a sigh, the smallest / orgasm in the world, so small I’d think, / did it
really happen? Like God. Delusion // 

is lies that tell the truth. I always knew how / to braid, how to move my long fingers: split / the
hair at the scalp into three thick sisters //

looped over the other’s length. Oh, I tugged hard / behind my own back, so hard, / it brought
tears to my eyes.

Jennifer Martelli

Note: Italic portions of poems are quotes from the film, Suspiria.

Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (forthcoming, December, 2024, Lily Poetry Review Books), as well as The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com