by Chloe Martinez

After Dorianne Laux


I’m in love with you, coffee,
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader.
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air
that gets a little too warm, then
a little too cold, because now I am
putting on and taking off repeatedly
this shawl I got long ago
when I was a student,
living in India for the first time,

and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake
was named Nakki, fingernail,
and the surrounding mountains were said
to be holy fragments of the body
of a goddess who fell to earth there.
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash.

Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines.
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory
of how my body felt then: curious
and excited, shy and defiant.
Also you, knowledge of how it feels
now: sometimes tired, or heavy
with sadness and experience,
which are often the same thing,

but other times, electric, connected
back to that person. She didn’t
know much. I wasn’t in love with her
then, but now I see her better.
How she stood unsure on a rural road.
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest
lush and loud all around her.

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Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

by Chloe Martinez

Nimbus: droplets in air, cloud-thought word

that rainbows at the right angle, as along the

             stair-step artificial river where the rainbow

             trout start small, just gently making their way

upstream—but if we proceed to the first little

waterfall place, we see the bigger ones making

             the leap, some failing and one caught mid-

             evolution for a moment, gripping with one fin-

arm the tiny fence, falling back—but they keep

flinging forward their slick slight bodies, as if trying

             to demonstrate a principle, as if God made them

             to show us what effort is. A real river is rushing,

after recent rains, beside us, but the rainbows

don’t even know or care, or do they? But at the top

             of the fake stream, the wall is higher, so

             the biggest fish leap up again and again but cannot

cross over—but the breathless curl of their

fan tails, but the wild and doomed enterprise of them—

             but we lean forward, watching, as if our bodies

             might lift theirs into the air, but a little higher—

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Chloe Martinez lives with her husband and two daughters in Claremont, CA, where she teaches on the religions of South Asia at Claremont McKenna College. A graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Waxwing, The Normal School, The Cortland Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is at work on a scholarly monograph and seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection.