By Jennifer Martelli

So many men love my friend:
her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch,
all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard

cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual,
like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference—
it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,

black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword
that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue,
What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:

five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me
a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills,
hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,

planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool
with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.

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Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her latest collection, The Queen of Queens, won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. http://www.jennmartelli.com