| Two Poems by Joan Martens
Jacaranda You’re driving the lifeless gray streets of L.A., used to the monotone of traffic, when an interruption in concrete makes you pull over. Exploding trumpets of purple fallen like a dropped skirt around the jacaranda unexpectedly tell you it is color you have been needing, this May transfusion pooling from a trunk like an opened vein. Your eyes, leaving and coming back again are intoxicated. Not that long ago you wondered if there would be another May, the month of diagnosis when cancer first burst inside you like spring pollen, perhaps carried by blood, to seed in an organ, to root in a bone, or (hopefully) cut like a weed, poisoned systemically withered in the burning. You stand in the purple pool, pick up a tiny royal horn, touch the limp skin of flower soft as the inside of elbow where butterfly needles, delicately thin, once pierced, probed hard, the scarred conduit walls of collapsed veins for entry, while you sat like an experiment turning gray as the faces of those initiated to the Infusion Room before you. You place it on the dash of your car to remember the silent letting go. Cause and Effect I am twenty-three and smiling in this picture. It is moving-in day. Behind me, an old country house, white wood frame, neatly hemmed by picket fence. My husband frames the picture to show off to city families the blooming orange, Queen Annes and Bings that line the drive. On the back I will write, “We’ve gone back to the country!” We signed the lease that morning, the proud Armenian holding us with stories about his homestead house on ten acres of cling peaches, about the days when orchards spread “darn far as the eye could see” across the flatland of the Central Valley. His crop dusters came the next morning unannounced, before full light. And though I quickly closed the house each time the buzz and swoop began that Spring, the poison settled at sill level, crept under the doors, coated the chimney flue, drifted up from the root cellar. Rising from bed those hot, humid nights, peeling off a damp nightgown, I would throw open the windows hoping for a breeze, letting the acrid smell of malathion blow freely through the house, and pass naked to the kitchen, to gulp glass after glass of contaminated well water. Joan Martens |