Jennifer Martelli

Dear_________,

Today, to ease my anxiety, I thought of the scariest scene in The Shining—

remember we saw it at the movies our last spring together, just after my abortion,

and the hostage crisis only six months old. It wasn’t the sister ghosts or

the ghost in the green bathtub. It was the opening scene. It was the vastness

of America and those mountains as the little Volkswagen crossed the divide

into a place so big, so deep, only a helicopter or bald bird of prey

could follow the road and understand what kind of country this was.

And then, at the movie’s very end, that old photograph hanging on the wall

of the haunted hotel: Jack Nicholson in the foreground, July 4, 1921. His eyes

the eyes of a raptor. He’d always been there, celebrating America’s birthday.

I see you in many men: angry men, bloated, omnipresent, powerful, afraid

of their own impossible hungers. I was so hungry after not eating for six weeks.

Do you remember the Fatted Calf down the street from the clinic? That rare burger

in the plastic basket filled with thick fries? Finally, I could keep something down.

To the Zip Tie

(with a line by Erika Meitner)

In your nylon toothed-heart of toothed-hearts,

you meant only to bind shut the mouth of a trash bag,

wrap traction around the sole and toe of a boot on snow,

tame the snakes’ nest of cables and wires. This is how

I gauged your love and your tensile strength: a dislocated bone—

shoulder blade, ankle socket, the eight small carpals

in my wrist. First I felt adored / then I felt complicit.

I gave you meaning you never asked for. You wanted

to be called by your name, not the sound you make when pulled

to grip and bite and hold.

I’ll never know the temperatures you can’t survive:

never too hot for you to melt away your strength,

never too cold enough for you to break apart like ice.