Impeachment Day: Planning the Party

Jennifer Martelli 

The mezzaluna blade for the pie, the gold torque around my half an adam’s apple,

the swing of my skirt, the one decorated in small sea-horses,

each seahorse monster, a little hippocampus, indelible,

sewn over & over with cotton thread at the hem.

But that’s simply a list of weird things.

I want this day to curve

back to that first day: two tips of a crescent moon.

The morning of my impeachment party, I’ll visit the dentist

as I did that first day back in November. 

I’ll rinse with Stoli. I’ll wear the lead vest. I’ll touch

the inside of my mouth & not feel it. Deep below Boston,

under Boylston, the old green line trolley curves slowly, a long

creak of rubber against metal. The train is like a woman

because it curves. The train is like a man because it’s shrill.

The afternoon of my impeachment party, I’ll hold

tight the rubber strap, the steel pole. I’ll dare a man to cop a feel

up & down my ribs. I’ll plant my feet on the ridged floor

& I won’t fall.  

Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (forthcoming, Bordighera Press), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2017). Her work has appeared or will appear in The Sycamore Review, Sugar House, Superstition Review, Thrush, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her prose and artwork have been published in Five-2-One, The Baltimore Review, and Green Mountains Review. Martelli has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.