Milk Glass by Jennifer Martelli

Floating on the internet, a disembodied hand
palms a pig’s heart, all washed
in Ivory dish soap, immaculate and
clean of its porcine protein. Doctors hope to grow
something human on this pimpled pump.
Someone said it was the heart of a ghost
because it could become anything, could
shatter like glass if dropped. Someone made
a meme, said: This is how boys’ hearts be
for the rest of their lives after one girl hurts them.
The heart’s chambered walls are absolute,
and deep inside the quartet of atria,
sits a girl: the blamed-one, the bride.
She’s packed her hope chest with a milk glass
bud vase no bigger than her hand, a candy dish,
a shallow bowl all wrapped in yards of washed lace
human cells. Someday, the heart will be buried deep
in a chest. I love a task with a beginning and an end,
with walls that stop me in my tracks, clean.

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.

See some of her other amazing work right here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/hot-things-to-me-are-not-dark-by-jennifer-martelli/ and here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2022/07/04/dear-_____-n/

Guest Editor Shibazrule, aka Lisa D. Chavez, is a poet based in New Mexico.  Her poetry books include Destruction Bay (West End Press) and In An Angry Season. (University of Arizona Press). She also writes memoir and fiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico.  She’s delighted to have the opportunity to be Guest Editor here at The Coop for the month of August.

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