Five Poems by Martha Deed
Deadly Spin
Stopped in
my tracks
I am dizzy
no snow
(a lie)
my tracks
not in snow
(the truth)
rats in the
subway
metaphoric
rats on the loose
everywhere
I look
dizzy
from fumes
the
snowblower?
the
lawnmower?
chainsaw?
left running
too close
to my office
door?
Not this
time.
This time it
is commentators
replacing
facts with ideological
smoke unfit
for breathers
of any age.
Nine crows
fly crookedly
across the sky
windblown
hills dip
and turn
beneath
their wings
landmarks at
unfamiliar angles
cloak
roadkill with snow
The Rain
she sets out
for adventure of the most esoteric kind
end around
the chestnut tree inside a yellow taxicab
rained upon ‒ hence wet with rain
exotic ‒ yet fragmented ‒ as it were ‒
a little dry
between the wet
not damp,
nor neither wholly dry nor wholly wet
expanding
puddles in the rain
and not yet
end of Fall
nor Winter
yet when it would
do to
complain about the freezing
rain that
cools the brain beyond all thought
except to go
inside (which we would all agree)
is no
thought at all but a poet's
life of
insignificance
if all there
is to do
is to
complain about the rain
Life After
Death
His ledger
of plantings and visits and meetings and deaths
the desk he
built to put it in
the labeled
photographs
the Tufted
Titmouse that was my Mother's bird
the poems
and diaries
the compiled
list of Rockland County birds
observed
since 1835
letters from
Civil War battlefields
and
hospitals and prison camps
not emails
left on defunct servers
nor computer
files on "cannot read" OSs
not
telephone messages even if recorded
if on
outdated devices
diaries
letters
delivered several times a day
Pony Express
conversations
scrapbooks
for postcards written home
log of
sailing trip that ended in a nor'easter
marriage
licenses and immigration papers
with notes
attached as to who they were
and why they
journeyed to this continent
under sail
and a journal of a baby's life
in French
followed ten years later
by a mysterious
death in a Louisiana
institution
for the dipsomaniac and insane
the census
report marked "inmate"
the shade
alive inside its riddle
Doing
Business
As
a rule, the man who carries his office in his hat is not a satisfactory person
with whom to have dealings in such immaterial things as stocks and bonds.
‒Edward
Crapsey. The Nether Side of New
York. The Galaxy Magazine. April 1871
Before I
decide if I will do business with you I want to know
How big is
your hat?
What color
is it and of what style and vintage?
Who belongs
to this hat?
Does he have
a name?
Or, is it a
woman's hat despite the "his" of your text?
Does the hat
belong to a big-headed man or to a pin-headed man?
How much
room does his brain take up in this hat?
Has he
obtained the licenses and associations of his trade?
Is he
dyspeptic?
Is it the
hat of a president or a madman or a saint?
And you who
have made this rule
Do you own
stock?
And who pays
you?
Are you
backing some new technology?
For
instance, do you speak of someone
carrying his
business naked in his hat?
Or is his
business contained upon some techie gadget
small enough
to be carried in a hat
hence more
reliable than a rabbit?
Harder to
decide whom to do business with these days
than to jump
bareback over 3-foot high hurdles
on a 4-foot
high horse
The Chicken
Yard
as
with all animals, its the weakest that get picked on.in your case each time the
weakest is removed then the next weakest gets attacked
‒
http://forum.thepoultrysite.com/discussion/13477/redirect/p1
1
There is
something going around these days
contagious,
I think
the sun went
away eight days ago
dull beauty
outside my window
reveals
little
2
This was her
window
the deer
flowed through her view
left to
right ‒ 4 or 8 or 12 or 20 ‒
in a line‒
right to left
she had SSI
the sickness
melted her bones
dissolved
her organs
it hurt
no one
thought
it could
happen
she said
I think we
don't know
what we
don't know
she said
the labs and
tests
may not show
what is
happening
to me
she said
I need an
autopsy
so someone
will know
she said
I wanted to
warn people who knew me before
I have
changed a lot physically ‒
and will be
using a power wheelchair . . .
I am not officially embarrassed (or proud) to be disabled
but I'd
still prefer to have old acquaintances greet me
“Hello, glad
to see you” ‒ rather than ‒
“Omigod,
what happened to you”
six weeks
later
she was dead
on SSI
3
They sat
around a table
It was break
time
They were
middle-aged or elderly
and each one
there possessed
a physical
challenge that brought them to that table
“They take
twice as long to do a job
If you pay
them by the hour
You will pay
them more than an able-
bodied
person who would do a better job
and they
probably have SSI as well”
“Probably it
doesn't matter they are paid only pennies
at the
charity for their work. The agency sends
a bus for them.
It must do
them good to get away from home.
The pay
doesn't matter.
They
probably have SSI as well”
“One of them
told me he sees four movies a week
I see one
movie in an entire year
And he texts
on his cellphone all the time
He has more
money than I have
And he
probably gets SSI as well”
They sat at
the round table
passing
seedless grapes and biscotti
drinking
tea. The most bitter among them
had earned a
living treating broken bodies
Wrapped in
some invisible cloak of superiority
from some
invisible star or moon or plant
what
blessing did they celebrate?
That they
could see?
Or hear?
Or move?
Think?
No ‒ not think.
*****
Martha Deed's collections include We Should Have Seen This Coming (locofo,
Moria, 2017) and her selected works, Climate
Change (Foothills Publishing, 2014). Her other full-length works include The Last Collaboration (Furtherfield,
2012), editing her daughter, Millie Niss's, selected poetry, City Bird (BlazeVox, 2010), and Intersections: a 20-day journal of the
unexpected (Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, 2006). Chapbooks include The Water Bill (Benevolent Bird, 2014), The Lost Shoe (Naissance, 2010), This is Visual Poetry (chapbookpublisher, 2010), 65 X 65
(Peter Ganick's small chapbook project, 2006), #9 (Furniture Press, 2004).
Her work has been included in a dozen anthologies published by Foothills
Publishing, Iowa, Mayapple, Xexoxial, Red Hen and others, and hundreds of her
poems have appeared in online and print journals including Truck, New Verse News, On Barcelona, poemeleon, qarrtsiluni, CLWN WR,
Shampoo, Milk, and others.
Collaborations with Millie Niss include poetry videos and web
installations in Iowa on the Web and other online and gallery exhibits.
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