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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: My Tarantella by Jennifer Martelli

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This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from My Tarantella by Jennifer Martelli, released by Bordighera Press in 2018.

In the North End

Boston loomed, lit: a wasp’s nest ignited and inhaled. My friend’s
lungs stopped for five sweet panic-seconds. Two millennia ago,
Sappho said in some future time someone will think of you. I said count.
In nineteen-nineteen, the brick streets in the North End flooded
with a million gallons of thick blackstrap molasses. My friend’s big
red heart beat: four valves vibrating, a mandolin tremolo. Count. The
asters. The Pleiades.

Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016, In the Year of Ferraro (Nixes Mate Press, 2020) and The Queen of Queens, forthcoming in 2022 from Bordighera Press. Her work will appear or has appeared in The Tahoma Literary Review, Thrush, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest), and Poetry. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

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