Jennifer Martelli :: Jennifer Jean

Editor's Note: Once in a while, a cross-tie slips through the ether, and this is one. It was written in 2020.
​We share it now in the hope that Jennifer Martelli would forgive the error if she were here. 

---

I remember hoping
to find hermit crabs the size of the mole on my right side chin.
And if I tethered them to a stick they’d line up by mass and trade shells, find homes
that fit. And there’d be one left without, one torn out. A book said
a scientist leaned into wet sand, watched a torn crab die
in the beak of a gull. I can’t remember if I saw that death or read it. 
I remember
 
watching a wrong castle tucked into a wrong mountain notch on the chin of the sky,
like the hermit mole on my chin
if my face were the sky. “It’s a beauty mark,”
my mother had said, “Don’t pick at it.” I eyed that smoking stranger at the wheel
and dug my nail in
as the Pacific swelled into view that first time.
 
                                    from “The Pacific,” Poetry Magazine, September, 2018

---

I’ve been writing poetry with my friend, Jennifer Jean, for about 10 years. She was running a workshop at this bookstore in Salem that I joined, sight unseen! I’m not sure if it was our names, or my admiration of her and her work, but we became friends—fellow poets reading work to each other. I followed Jennifer to Big Table Publishing, and then to editing poetry for Mom Egg Review. Jennifer founded the Morning Garden Writers’ Retreat in Gloucester, MA; around that time, she began holding poetry workshops to survivors of sexual slavery. Her work with these women and the work she produced was humbling, awe-inspiring. I’m looking forward to her chapbook, Object Lessons, from Lily Poetry Press, a magnificent collection of poems recounting that time. Jennifer has been honored for her writing and her activism, including: the Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop; a Disquiet Fellowship; a “Her Story Is” Residency, where she worked with Iraqi women artists in Dubai; and an Ambassador for Peace Award.

Jennifer and I work on each other’s poems regularly; she is an exacting editor. I love her line breaks, her quirky language!

                                                           ~ In memory of Jennifer Martelli                                           

---

---

Jennifer Jean

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. Along with Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, she's co-written and co-translated a correspondence in Arabic and English poems, titled Where Do You Live? أين‭ ‬تعيشين؟. As well, she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2026). Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Rattle Magazine, On the Seawall, The Common, the Los Angeles Review, on The Slowdown Podcast, and in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. She’s received honors from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective, a faculty member at the Solstice MFA, and a senior program manager at the Fine Arts Work Center.

---