Jennifer Martelli

Root

“The word “anger” has a strange root: it is etymologically related to “angina” and “hangnail.”

 
I bought a new knife, sliced an onion through its skin,
through its sixteen layers. I was Sylvian and Plathian.
I sliced close to the nail bed of my left ring finger,
 
low to the lunula. This is my winter of hangnails
and split nails. I spit nails: crescent moons
fly out of my mouth and across the maple wood floor and
 
little white knives of cartilage sprout still hinged
to my skin, catch on my gray wool wrap. The root
of anger is the kissing cousin of hangnail. Today
 
I learned that pearls without cores make the ideal
sculpting medium if you were to sculpt skulls—
the skins don’t crack or peel. I can never wed again.
 
The kissing cousin of anger is angina: a stab wound
to my sacred heart, the one wound with wire. My grandma
said if we swallowed seeds from a fruit we’d grow
 
that tree in our stomachs; if we swallowed
the fingernails we chewed off, our tummies
would be torn open by the claws we grew.
 

Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her chapbook, After Bird, was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared or will appear in Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest), The Sycamore Review, and POETRY. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. A native of Massachusetts, Martelli received degrees from Boston University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Series. Her favorite sweet: KitKat!

 … return to Issue 13.1 Table of Contents.