Dana Henry Martin - Three Poems

The Fifth Day of the Cruelest Month

Stand with brittle bones and feel this day

ticking like a cardinal’s morning call.

You are the gloss, the bill, the pinkish feet.

You are also the empty crop, the stomach

lined with plastic, the glorious cloaca

waiting to pass eggs. Into the world,

a miracle and another, each pigment-

speckled. Lizards make their way to rock,

their bodies nearly black in the still-cold air.

They look like burned human parts separated

from the whole. But that’s the wars inside you

seeing things again, telling their stories.

Here, it’s April and the quail don’t mean you

any harm, even as they come over the hill

with their feathered headgear, even as they

announce their arrival and run vaguely toward

where you stand, aching. You have things to do,

human things. Stop writing yourself into

the wild and get on with your nonbreeding

life, your unflowering, your rootbound

memories. It’s been spring for weeks now.

The Fifteenth Day of the Cruelest Month

Stand with brittle bones and feel this day

dropping like a rock thrown into a lake.

It was meant to skip but didn’t. Meant

to delight the eye and alarm sentient life

beneath the surface, but it fell and kept

falling through water, grazing slimy plants,

bewildering fish who mistake it for a lure,

a hunting, wondering if they’re next. They are,

as are you and your brittle bones and your

nonsense about things not being that bad.

They’re not coming to people’s doors. Not

taking citizens. Not yet. But the name on your

birth certificate and driver’s license don’t match,

do they? And you’re white but not straight,

aren’t you? And you’ve closed your mouth

around worms real and imagined, haven’t you?

Haven’t you? How many times, thinking they were

nourishment? Thinking it was just another day

in the clean waters of life. Your safe life. What kind

of sage are you, girl? If we can even call you that.

The Twenty-Fifth Day of the Cruelest Month

Stand with brittle bones and break the day.

You’re wasted land, a fistful of dead clover,

a mountain surprised by sunlit rain.

Don’t speak. What do you have to say

anyway? Silence rises to meet you,

slender by your side, now snakelike

behind you. It won’t bite unless you do.

And you will. You want to taste its heart.

You always want to taste its heart

as it moves away from you like teased

water and waits under the empty bed

in the warm cold. Belladonna, ballerina,

hanged woman, clairvoyante who can’t

read her own cards. Where are the woolen

hours? The dead in their beds in the gardened

desert? Unreal, you are unreal, a fog of lost

desire that chokes wanting. What sprouts

is making way for your corpse, your body

a sealed mausoleum of yesterdays. Sit down.

Your words are waiting, your worth nowhere

to be found. How long have you been drowned?

—

This poem uses words from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

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Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books). Martin lives with primary immunodeficiency, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and several other chronic health issues.