Jennifer Martelli

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This Box of Rabies: A Cento


You're living with dangerous people.

When women tell you the truth, you don't pity them. 

Today, we need to break the nose of every beautiful thing.

I was thinking of an animal. / Her body is a prison.

But not yours.

Love and manipulation, they share houses very often. They are frequent bedfellows.

That is religion. / Can you not feel it? We have to stop this.

Part of the issue is not being able to see your body in space.

Every arrow that flies feels the pull of the earth, but we must aim upwards.




[all lines from Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadagnino; screenplay by David Kajganich. The lines were spoken, in order, by the following characters: Olga Ivanova; Dr. Josef Klemperer; Miss Huller; Madam Blanc; Miss Marks; Susanna Bannion; Mother Suspiriorum; Klemperer; Blanc]

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Giallo


I saw my mother’s cobalt blue

vial of Auralgan oil, the one she’d warm

in a Pyrex egg cup of hot water

on the kitchen counter while I

rested my head on the gold rooster

dishtowel, pulled my virgin ear



by the lobe to open the narrow canal

that led to the red infection.

I could feel my heart beat hard

on the membrane of my eardrum,

could feel it in my fevering head.

The vial’s cap had a small glass



pipette and a rubber plunger she

would screw, unscrew then squeeze

three oily tear drops down into my ear.

I would swallow and taste this oil

so slippery, numbing. Inside

my head were secret tunnels that met



in the back of my throat: a hollow,

coated thick and filmy. The bottle

was beautiful, tiny, easy enough

to fit in my palm: the blue glass filtering

out all giallo: the yellow light,

and the hot red rust in my home.

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My Lip. My Scalp. My Skin.

Red is an unnatural thing. Up and down

the aisles of Stop & Shop, red shapes:

hearts in red foil over chocolate over cherry,

red silhouettes of babies with red bows, red arrows,

red cards with ruby glitter hearts so they shock,

so they refract and tell me to love when I don’t.

Red roses bound in satin and red tulips. Plath’s

red vase of tulips by her fever bed. Hungry

red, watchful red, a plush thumbful: I mixed

red into the risen kneaded dough, stained it,

gave it a different taste. Red where it shouldn’t

be red. My lip. My scalp. My skin. My cold

water tap gushed red, the old main brought

rust to my house: every sink, every bowl

and basin filled red for an hour. I flushed

and rinsed and spat afraid to swallow poison.

Red bleeds—yes, bleeds—in the way beet juice

stains my fingers, my whorls. I am cold,

a winter, the color chart says, I should wear wine

or cardinal. Today, the light lasted past five: I saw—

while I was cooking food—a red bird or its shape fly

past my steaming window, through the low brush.

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Thoughts on Horror in Poetry and Film

This fascination started a long time ago for me. Horror, especially in movies, has always drawn me. My mother and I would stay up late watching old horror movies and eating blue cheese with crackers. And of course, I had Saturday afternoon’s Creature Double Feature. I have good memories surrounding horror. When I was about 13, Stephen King’s novel, Salems’ Lot, was published. This is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read about a small town in Maine, overrun by vampires. What was alluring was that King used a Wallace Stevens poem as an epigraph to one of his chapters, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” an odd poem about death and pleasure. What did this macabre poem, that centered “wenches,” a dead woman with bad feet, cigars and ice cream, have to do with vampires? This can be another class altogether, but let me just say, this is where poetry took root: in a vampire novel. I was doomed.

Lately, I’ve been interested in poems or poetry collections that center horror. I’m in the process of writing poems that respond to Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 film, Suspiria, a revisioning of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo film (giallo is Italian for yellow, which was the color of pulp novel covers. It is a genre that we may think of as a “slasher” film; there’s usually psychological horror involved, and sometimes, a supernatural element).

My poems, I guess, are ekphrastic, meaning I’m responding to another kind of art; if art doing a lot of heavy lifting here, let’s say a poet is responding to another genre. I became obsessed with Guadagnino’s revisioning of Suspiria mainly because it did not rely on “the final girl” concept (don’t want to spoil); he also—in a nod to Argento—set the poem in 1977 Berlin, during the German Autumn. Politically, the resonances to now are unsettling. I responded to his themes of autonomy, belonging, acceptance, and secrecy. But mostly, I loved the color palette; where Argento’s film is shocking red throughout, this version is gray, tan, brown—so when the red makes its entrance, it’s startling. I also loved Thom Yorke’s score.

The collection that made me realize I could embrace, without explanation or apology, a horror film, was Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, which is a collection that responds to Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining. This is a book without notes or footnotes; Lasky is depending on our knowledge of this film (not the novel) to write a collection that asks us, as she does in her Lit Hub article, “What else has the capacity to speak to us but horror?”
I love this bold assumption. Not everybody loves or knows about certain horror films, books, or tropes. Do we risk losing readers? This question goes back to ekphrasis: how much does the reader have to know about the art you’re responding to for the poem/collection to have resonance?

How much weight can the poem hold? I love this risk. I love taking the chance on horror.

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Banner Art:
from Untitled, Paula Campos, 2020