Inside the Blue Triple Decker with Oriel Windows on Kinnaird Street

Jennifer Martelli

              “At a certain place when she see something / it will break her eye" 
              —Lucille Clifton

Still, a cool night in April. The world springs forward, dazzled by a sleight of hand and a bouquet blooming from a sleeve. I missed the trick of the missing hour, my body in a tornado light. Rising like ivy from the V of his legs to receive his full, open, hard kiss, my eyes widen, capture filtered light through the window. I have hope in half moments of no God, no love, no next-thing-hovering, no white pill clicking the world into place, as a bone clicks, a throat. The VCR clock parses out finger-widths of light to the cherry blossom twigs in a blue jar on the windowsill, swollen & dry-eyed, creaking open white and not ever blinking.

*

My husband dozes on the couch, head in my lap. I see my handprints on the window above his head, shoulder-width apart, as if for push-ups. I can’t choose what to watch: a plane nose-dives on TV, and the passengers must take out false teeth, take off pins and eyeglasses. One woman can’t do this; she covers her eyes and shakes her head, no, no, while the stewardess yells, Give them to me! but she’ll be blind. But this is the hero’s dream, and he screams himself awake. On a talk show, a dominatrix wears a chainmail corset and leads a blindfolded man with a leash and collar. It’s about trust. How far will you go with pain when your partner’s helpless? My husband starts and looks at me as if I were a killer. He, too, must have landed in his falling dream—it’s me, it’s me. My handprints are all over our house. Year after year, he grows lovelier to me.

*

Every night, a man walks his low-slung pet down Kinnaird Street. Once, my husband and I looked out at the same time. Sweet, I thought, assuming his pet to be the freak of a Jack Russell litter—not chic, but hairy, saved from the bitch-terrier’s maternal jaws. My husband said, Only a jerk would keep a pig—a hairy one—on a leash. He hoped this man, being so pretentious and cruel, got what he deserved: no friends, and the pig grown hungry, mean, and tusked. Shakespeare wrote of such conflict. The nation’s bestselling book says this is the tragic crux. Well into the night, past dessert, we tried to make each other see and then slept, agreeing only on the richness of the animal’s pelt.

*

I don’t know how this sparrow sees—the one on the telephone wire traversing my yard and my neighbor’s—the wire parallel to my windowsill on which I laid the last of the bread, the two heels (not toasted for breakfast) lying between my husband and me on the table with the book about the autistic boy who sketches St. Paul’s cathedral from a glance. The sparrow’s head twitches sidelong, and it must be hungry—it’s taken in the scraps one eye at a time, its whole body trembling, with the poised head of a snake.

*

It could be four in the morning, and I could be high on cocaine—it’s that deserted. Maybe it’s the heat coming too sudden, heavy with dust from the heartland, but this street could be straight from that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird—the rabid dog’s slow lope raising tornadoes right into the path of the bullet aimed at his rotted brain. You just knew curtains in each home drew back for a safe view of the inevitable. I want to talk back to the radio on my windowsill. Even FM rock is all talk. On BCN, a man calls in:  Deport. Deport. Deport. On FNX: All Arabs are not Muslims. Now President Clinton comes on every station and asks with his soft drawl for all of America to pray. This seems the clement thing. Words rain down on us like rubble, cleaving and cleaving.

*

From her ex-husband’s book, this is what I know of Mrs. Dahmer’s pregnancy: that she conceived young and quick, that the sounds of cooking (the clank of it) turned her stomach, that Mr. Dahmer lay his stethoscope on her belly (I don’t know what they heard . . . perhaps the fallen leaves scraping Kinnaird), and that she fled well before her son was let loose on the world. The second Mrs. Dahmer went blind as those women who waded over bones to the safe end of the killing fields. Some women do go blind. Hysterical blindness, we know it’s called. I wouldn’t have to look too long. Take all the Annunciation portraits: Mary’s chance glimpse up from the book on her lap to the angel. Her eye breaks, and the whole world drops to its knees. What I don’t know is what to avoid.

*

She lies inside me like a concubine with little to do but wait. No—she doesn’t wait. She lies like a concubine on an oriental rug, bored by the monotony of wool and pleasure. I’m the one who’s here, waiting for the O.J. verdict, watching the three maples lose their violent red and gold. Even though she’s kept wrapped very still, her bones will carry the weight of what’s outside: it will enter anyway. By the time cold falls, she’ll move from here to there at a crawl, like a woman crossing.

*

 After her 2 a.m. nursing, I leave the bed to smoke out the oriel window. My body is night-sweaty. Covered in my red flannel robe, it feels as though it’s shrinking back to size in the cold. Two stories down, there’s a deep maroon Jeep and the triple decker across Kinnaird and all of Cambridge. I began Calvino’s book last week—over and over, Marco Polo described for Kublai Kahn cities, each more bejeweled, corrupt, whore-filled and port-holed, cities telescoping out—all the same city, finally no city at all. I’ve never been free. Steam and smoke and milk all over me and off of me. In a room in the triple decker a light stays on, and a young man sits very still. He may be up the whole time, too. When the streetlights click off and people start their days as usual, believe me, he won’t know what to do.

*

A year ago, in April when I came home, the month-old magazine with Jane Kenyon’s poem and her life (begun and ended in parentheses) was so swollen and sticky from the heat that the pages tore apart. I had criss-crossed England in days, tried to lure an orange-blotched baby lamb that grazed in what was the nave, and bled for the last time. This April is cooler than the last. Now I have a daughter swinging back and forth between gray-eyed sleep in my living room with the oriel windows while I read that poet’s spanking-new posthumous collection of poems. When I stood among the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, I thought: my whole life, I’ve wanted to see or to read something this perfect.

Jennifer Martelli’s debut poetry collection, The Uncanny Valley, was published in 2016 by Big Table Publishing Company. She is also the author of After Bird from Grey Book Press. Her work has appeared in Thrush, PANK, Glass Poetry Journal, Cleaver, The Heavy Feather Review, Italian Americana, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Jennifer 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 book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly as well as the co-curator for The Mom Egg VOX Folio.