Poems:
Betsy Mitchell Martinez
stay-at-home abecedarian
Abdication, it turns out, is not a silver bullet. I still wake before six to punch cucumbers into hearts, sort uniform, delicate berries into bentos over a loop of Elsa letting go, as if the hard part is walking out. Forget the snow, I want to tell her. Put on your gloves and absorb that storm like the rest of us—moistureheavy, hair pulled back in a knot of irritation, hunting the fridge for hummus cups, the right flavor of juice box. That ice palace in the far corner of the mind is only a missing kitten icepack wedged in the back of the freezer, loved and forgotten, meowing all night from behind the bag of dino nuggets until I startle awake, orient my ear to an imagined cry. Or perhaps it’s real, perhaps someone has an urgent question that can’t wait till dawn, a bloody nose, a sock to readjust. And someone needs to hear that bedtime story again, the one about a dog crossing the electric fence to get her tennis ball. It’s a familiar punchline running charged under the permafrost of lives not lived, a high-pitched vibration buckled in for the ten-minute drive to the Albuquerque Whole Foods, boundary wire snug in its xeric bed, transmitter lit with corrections singing yes, singing here I am while I stand buzzing at a sale display, admiring the Zia sun of seltzer boxes, easing a clementine ray from the black cherry sky.
Who Would Win?
after Jerry Pallotta
1.
When a great white shark loses a tooth it grows a new one. A killer whale can’t replace the loss but bounces the idea of loss into the sea to measure distance. How far from here to whole? When they diagram my skeleton, a skull floats in the body’s sunless trench. A map of small extinctions—ghost of ribs, primordial drag and pull smoothed down to the necessary salt-shape of want. In this way I flex toward you, cageless, tooth-rich and buoyant with hunger. Did you know that glory is a muscle that never quits, that wraps the tide around the wonder of olfaction? And glory is your blood smell, old as God.
BETSY MITCHELL MARTINEZ
The hyena runs its prey to exhaustion, eats the furred collapse before it dies. Some call this inelegant, placing one form of communion above another, but I was born to swell the honey badger’s lungs. I fall upon them joyfully. Do you remember the old days, when I asked for jaws to crush the bones of self, of hallelujah, as if that boon were not already mine? And this sublime endurance, also mine, a steady-state pursuit that burns for more. I’ll chase you into light, fierce confessor, opener of hives. I bait you with honey, my bone-white scat. You peel back the sound they call a laugh.
A skunk will sleep in any hollow—a borrowed den, a log. A wedge of space between the jaguar’s dark rosettes, the negative that fits a wedge-shaped head. I won’t tell, if you won’t, how I came to be alone inside your camouflage, how I push aside your undergrowth at dawn and find my organs filled again to the brim with distance. Is it not a miracle, this learning which abundance can’t be shared? O glorious rebuff. O hesitating tooth. Let me curl against your haunch and press your spotted blindfold to my eyes. If I can’t see you
I won’t know where to spray. In darkness I can find the songs of praise.