that may be missing an enzyme. Missive from I believed my version of ruse and ruin. It’s true: at boulevards I seek out the craziest donuts, Bear Mountain Bavarian, Triple Blitz Crunch. Everywhere I turn, the tulips are redder than the Spanish word
for blood. Everywhere the curbs are crumbling (don’t go barefoot). Everywhere: prosecco fountains empty into cruise-able rivers. I want the dead to be what pops when I shake the bottle, aim the cork at the hedges. What I promise is the tenderness
of a tamed tiger, a small gray cat crawling under your duvet. Did you say permission or persimmon? Either way, I will be your plankton, what keeps you phosphorescent. Together let’s venture into imperishable brightness,
dimness suddenly strobing. Find a seat beside a bed of crocuses, which you’ll remind me is where we get saffron. Dine on and shine on. Become more than a chainsaw and its log. At our feet the space junk of the 60s and 70s, scraps of the lunar module that carried Neil and Buzz. It’s true: I get mean when I don’t get my way, when I’m forced to build a nest in the future tense, when I’m forbidden the call of an osprey. When heat gives way to dusk.
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Self-Appraisal at 62
Sometimes, it’s okay to ask which cracked terracotta pot, what about this place called Earth, though sometimes it’s okay to not ask permission to appear
in a low-cut gold-lame dress higher up the thigh than someone, somewhere, considers appropriate. Mainly, it’s staying in your reclined movie seat till the very last credit, till you find out who wrote every song,
including “What Was I Made For?” Such a good question! Ask yourself, and I will too. But mostly? Adventures in vexing. Dostoevsky-ishly nuanced. Feeling more at home in my bosom-buddy body,
yet wrapped in every glass of Pinot Grigio, every oops-no-SPF suntanning afternoon. Something like inexorably, not to be discouraging. As I often say to my life partner, would you rather the alternative? Despite juicy maggots and blowflies,
I carry on with the bubbly, my plate piled high with Pasta alla Norma, always stop at that bakery in Cashmere with the baguette straight out of Anjou. It’s too soon to know how bad it will get,
but for now there are sexual pleasure tools out the wazoo. I mean, the MRI revealed a white spot on my right frontal lobe, so I Dr. Googled: possible early sign of dementia.
SO fun! (as I like to text), but today all my Nutter Butters and Lorna Doone’s are exactly where they belong, and I’m coming and going like a subway line to Queens.
It’s not quite a choose your own adventure, though I do make sure to roll down grassy hills, to stand in line for an ice cream novelty when the rainbow van pulls up, to make a little lotus blossom
with my fingertips. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to take a long, good look in the mirror, ask Change? Why would I change? To give the future both the finger and a thumbs up.
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Martha Silano is a poet living with ALS. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. Martha’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019).
