Blur

When I was a child, I could blur the world
with my telescope ocular muscles: make shapes
softer and pastel. It’s harder to cinch things now.

I’m letting my lavender impatiens die
slowly in their steel boxes and clay pots—
I don’t want to care for them

on the cusp of fall. I don’t want to watch
their long deaths, either. My cat Maria
can’t abide my leaving her even for an hour,

will look me in the eye and shit on my bed.
I learned today that not all people can blur things
with their eyes—they must look and look until

they cry or look away. I bring my white spread
to Sunshine Express Laundry, watch the spin,
the spiral. My mother told me lies about so much.

She told me my face could freeze: a grimace, a pout,
cross-eyes. She feared dirt and poverty, feared our clothes
touching someone else’s. I’d planted impatiens

too shallow: all the roots exposed, thick, snake-
like. I can still let in the tiniest bit of light.
See? It’s fading into fall, sooner each day.

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Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and My Tarantella, also named a “Must Read” and awarded Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Martelli’s chapbooks include All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, After Bird, and In the Year of Ferraro. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, Folio, Jet Fuel Review, The Northwest Review, Tab: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants for poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.