Editor’s note: This week in Poetry Corner we highlight the work of local poet, Joanna Martin, the author of “The Meaning of Wings,” published by Hummingbird Press. She is the independent producer of The Poetry Box on Community TV, and a winner of the Mary Lönnberg Smith Poetry Award. She is a mother of two and has been a nurse at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz for 22 years, 11 years in Cardiac Care.
Middle-Aged Dating in Santa Cruz CountyHow men will live in the smallest, strangest places
after a divorce: a trailer, a converted garage,
someone’s back room, a makeshift cot and coffee pot
behind an auto repair shop or a van to keep on movin’ in.
Kaleidoscope rooms to confuse time, slip through space
like wind.
Gradually, however, she got used to this,
no longer necessarily assumed when they said they lived in a VW bus
it was a sign of mental illness, no longer considered
the fact that they bedded down each night in a Volvo
in an alleyway reason enough to turn them down
for a date (one anyway).
She also got used to inserting herself into poems disguised
in the third person.
They preferred viewing the world from an open tailgate
or a staccato view, stutter-controlled from the inside by
a garage door opener, nervously with their thumbs,
while she preferred hanging around between the first and
third stanzas wearing an iambic coat and alliterative shoes.
Perhaps these small rooms are a form of grief, she thought.
How they empty themselves out.
How they wait.
How they need.
Evolution of LoveHadn’t I spent one lifetime picking the beetles burrowed
in your furry skin as if they were gold delicacies melting
over the pad of my tongue and didn’t you
peel the brocaded gold of another lifetime’s drape
off me, toss it aside like a layer of skin shed
uncovering my beating heart?
Hadn’t we passed underwater together,
surfaced to be devoured on sandy shores,
remade in the cocoon of sun’s gold?
Weren’t our traces fossilized there,
hieroglyphs of time?
Hasn’t our story, told and retold
remained untold?
Each vessel, each shape, another baptism realized.
My heart, lit from below, a phoenix rising.
Didn’t I see your folds in my mold?
Didn’t you see in my eyes your future flash foretold?
Isn’t every second primed by the same groping arc,
prismed through the same different light?
Didn’t I unchain you then?
Wasn’t there the era of the memory of your scent?
Weren’t we Egyptian together
and then in the Middle Ages?
Wouldn’t we, again and again,
æaren’t our boundaries paper thin,
flaking like dust beneath touchæ
wouldn’t the me lying so long dormant in you
forever recognize the you in me?
Of now, of then?
Preparing the BodyThere is that moment as you wash
her corpse, you have to talk
yourself out of the breath
you know she didn’t take.
That moment as you look away
to rinse the wash rag, you feel
her eyes, opaque, take a last glance.
That moment you think she’ll pull
her crooked arm back again towards her
where it should be,
always has been.
You fix her in a more natural way.
Wonder what natural is.
Comb her hair
like a doll,
imagine her family’s thoughts
looking down at her,
lose yourself in that moment
wedged between person and corpse,
become disoriented.
No matter how many times you’ve done this
that moment of disorientation
rises and falls like light,
like shadows on the walls.
You’re with someone,
you’re not with someone,
you don’t know if you’re with someone.
Her body absorbs all sound,
a sponge,
the room a sanctuary of silence,
a sanctuary of what was:
other rooms,
other bodies.
The one whose soul lingered for a time,
watching you wash her husk.
The one whose skin remained rosy pink.
The one with translucent skin,
the receding blood sucking light in.
The gray ones,
blue ones,
brittle ones.
The ones you never knew,
the ones you knew only in coma,
the ones you knew,
their lines repeat in your head.
This one was an immigrant, a seamstress.
A mother.
The potent plastic smell
of the obscenely white body bag
wafts through the room
as you unwrap the seal with a scream.
The unzipped bag
gapes like a mouth along her length.
Her body flops
as she slaps back against plastic,
twice the weight this motionless state,
and the moment when you zip,
her body erased by the eating line
of black,
how you say goodbye then
to each part:
the leg, the thigh, the hip,
the waist, the breast, the neck,
until that moment at the chin
where you always forever pause
before the monumental task
of that, zipping a face in,
sacrilege
you perform as protocol
lined with all the secrets you hold
and suddenly you’re making confession
or penance to the other being
this corpse has become
and the face glows at the top
of the zipper, as if it knows,
with a hiss,
glows like a moon.
You zip in the moon,
zip in the night,
zip in the dark, yes.
Zip in death.
The Fine-Grained Brightness We All Aspire TowardsA triplet of patinated Cupids adorns this fountain,
forever frozen in poses of motion:
one has reached a finger skyward for more than a century,
another will caress a swan into the next millennium
and will the third never tire of reaching behind into his quiver
for that arrow?
As I sip my cup of tea in this museum courtyard
the setting sun’s lengthening, warming light
suffuses stone,
etches out certain things:
the inner forearm of one Cupid,
the breast plate of another,
a few casual locks of hair,
partial cheekbone,
tip of nose, shoulder’s curved sheen,
these familiar features emerge most human,
like certain photographs and portraits,
and held between the fingertip of one Cupid
and the wing of another
the nipple of the third Cupid divided equally now
between light as shadow,
between those places where
life is immortalized,
where immortality lives. 
StrangersI pass a man who passes me on the street.
He has a pot belly,
wears overalls,
an electrician or plumber.
He may live here in town.
I may pass him again sometime
or I may already have passed him several times,
anonymously,
each time again not recognizing him.
Either way, we pass five feet from each other
for a few moments,
briefly,
in the same sunshine
at least this once.
He doesn’t know I like my bagels blackened
around the edges, I read Nietzsche,
my mother committed suicide six years ago.
I don’t know he took care of his wife for two years
after her stroke before she died, still keeps her poodle,
wears size ten shoes, likes blueberry pancakes,
listens to BB King.
How is it, walking past one another with so much weight of living,
so heavily-ringed like redwood trees,
the years dense now as the first material that exploded
the universe in that faraway beginning,
how is it we don’t pull a little towards or even repel away
from each other, like magnets
or spin a little, like planets
or at least tilt a bit?
Not even a ripple.
Rather, we walk past each other as easily
as of the other never existed.
How easily we contain our lives
within these simple bags of bone and skin,
go about our business,
his, the wiring of the building,
mine, the returning of a library book.
How easily we slip past
in our disguise as particular beings
curtained in these certain unawarenesses,
a sheer boundary that parcels us off from one another,
breaks the one open into its billion streaming particles,
yet, floats us here together.
Allows.
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