Rita Maria Martinez
Rita Maria Martinez’s chapbook, Jane-in-the-Box, takes a character from classic English literature, Jane Eyre, and revamps her with tattoos, fishnets, and modern feminism (March Street Press, 2008). Martinez ’ work has appeared in Ploughshares, Gargoyle, Diagram, and Tigertail: A South Florida Poetry Anthology. Her writing is also featured in the eighth edition of Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry and Drama (Prentice Hall) and in Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish (Simon & Schuster). Martinez is an Academic Services Writing Consultant at Nova Southeastern University’s Student Educational Center in Miami. Her poem, Saint John Rivers Pops the Question on Jane Eyre, was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. Copies of Martinez’s chapbook are available for purchase by emailing RitaMartinez@comeonhome.org. Visit web site http://www.comeonhome.org/ritamartinez/index.html
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BLANCHE INGRAM’S BITTERNESS
Their wedding portrait and my modelling pics are smeared
across the tabloids like birdshit on a windowshield.
That smug mug, Miss Hoytoytoy’s blotchy pinched face
makes me puke. Never trust anyone named Jane—
especially a loose tooth who futzes with her fork
and doesn’t know how to butter her bread.
Good riddance to him and his French freeloader
says Mom. You’re in the bloom of youth, honey bunny.
Snag someone else. Someone younger. Richer.
With a six-pack. Without eczema.
I can’t take a drag or wet my whistle without bumping into the love
doves, without getting the skinny on their squirrel fever
from phonies at the club. The pair even planted their bony tails
on the pew in front of me at a funeral service. Miss Sloppy Seconds
nestled her head on his shoulders and gawked at her pititul
engagement ring like it was the eighth wonder of the world.
I wouldn’t shell out any dough for that paltry pebble.
Word is the grand Mister R is up to his ascot in back taxes
and hawked his Santa Cruz Stogies so he could rock her.
*
THE MIGRAINE
for Dr. Victor Barredo
All you touch turns to misery,
butcher of peace, tightly wound
clamp of despair making
decapitation seem desirable.
Evil troll. Elephant perched on my head.
Furious Frau fuming over spilled frappuccino.
Guttersnipe gnawing my nape,
hijacking innocent neurons. High maintenance
illness demanding ice, inhalers, Imitrex injections.
Jilted lover’s bad juju. Jaguar mauling my pillow. Judo chop.
Killjoy: obnoxious kazoo making me cry for Doctor Kevorkian.
Laughing hyena that follows me to the bathroom. Cerebral
mildew. Menstrual menace. My mind’s Mussolini.
Neurologic enigma. Neuralgic nightmare. Neurotic
ogre. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber lancing my frontal lobe.
Piranha, parasitic worm, pissy landlord, party pooper prompting
quarantine, queasiness, quick jabs to the temples.
Ruthless ambassador of pain. Roundhouse kick on instant replay.
Samurai sword shish kebabing the brain.
Tympanic turbulence. Thor’s hammer wreaking vengeance.
Unwanted chaperone. Uncouth shrew. Impalement by unicorn.
Vitriolic mother-in-law
wailing like Doe, Zoom, Exene, and D.J. Bonebrake,
X band members, punk rockers screeching.
Yutz broadcasting yellow bolts of lightning,
zigzags across my retinas.
*
POSTMORTEM LETTER TO CHARLOTTE
Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept—they are dangerous as Lucifer matches.
(Charlotte Brontë October 27, 1854)
You’re a commodity now. They will pillage your life.
They will raid the closets of your memory—
auctioning, trading, stealing your correspondence
for posterity, for entertainment, for several hundred pounds.
Everyone will know you had the hots for your French
teacher because his wife will salvage your ripped
scrawl from the trash and stitch the pieces together with cotton
and gum. Everyone will get the dish on daddy’s drinking problem,
will discover your little brother bagged an older babe,
a married woman named (appropriately enough) Mrs. Robinson.
Collectors will covet the grayish, black-bordered mourning
paper you used after Branwell, Emily, and Anne
are interred in the parsonage graveyard, will hunt down
the five fragments scattered across Haworth, Dublin, Texas,
New York, and Pennsylvania. Your life smudged by a combination
of familiar and foreign fingerprints, riddled with scratches
and Ellen’s deletions. Cutouts. Your dad will become the favored
pen pal of enthusiasts. His well-intentioned mutilations
resulting in relics—strips of cursive distributed like lotto tickets
to faithful Bronteites fascinated by your small scribble,
its looped back ds and sharply-angled y tails
slowly fading to a light brown.
