Jennifer Martelli

Owls and Bones

I’ve accumulated rooms of skulls and endoskeletons
of lego horses, soldiers, an embroidered skull with beads, very Mexican,
magnet bones of a silver gargoyle (on my range hood), the skeleton of an owl
in an unzipped owl suit. 

A poem is not a list of pretty things.  But look:

I have shot glasses of blown skulls.  OK.  I have Russian nesting dolls
in burkas and the innermost baby is bony in black lacquer.
I have a kewpie doll with a tiny fat penis and an owl bonnet.
My kids gift me owls and bones, but they do it in secret. A wisdom of owls

does not make me deep.  But look: I have cupcake tins in the shape of six skulls. 

Owl chopsticks made of bone plastic from the Oriental store in the Mall of the Dead.
I have a black pencil that has on its tip a tiny brass trilithon
from Stonehenge where I saw an owl fly over Salisbury Plain
one evening just before Jane Kenyon died. 

But look:  something in me takes things in its quiet talons, swoops,
leaves whole bones, once, the long vertebrae of a snake.