Jennifer Martelli

Clothes Pins

They were wooden, toothed, and they pinched
with a coiled hinge. I kept the ones that fell
from my mother’s mouth or dropped from the sack

on the green pole cemented into the kidney-shaped
patio. The flowers my mother planted all along
the far end in the small garden thought too hard,

too deep, too long. This made their heads big,
heavy. They swung on their thin green necks,
weighed themselves down with the heat.

Everything in that backyard absorbed the sun:
the rectangle of jonquils, tiger lilies, asters,
cosmos, the clothes, the cotton rope to hold

the laundry. I would put a clothes pin on each finger
to give myself claws, and sometimes, I made them
my puppets: live things with jaws, trying to eat each other.

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Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and 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. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest) and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.