Featured Poet Chloe Martinez
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Chloe Martinez
Chloe Martinez, Poems
Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She grew up in New Bedford, MA and attended Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow. She did her graduate work at UC Santa Barbara, Boston University, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar. Her scholarly articles appear in South Asia and The Medieval History Journal and she is at work on a monograph about religion and autobiography in pre-modern-to-modern South Asia. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, including Waxwing, The Common, Prairie Schooner and Shenandoah. She has taught at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges and currently teaches at Claremont McKenna College, where she is a Lecturer in Religious Studies and the Program Coordinator at the Center for Writing and Public Discourse. When she can find the time, she writes poetry book reviews for RHINO, is a reader for The Adroit, and helps to organize a new reading series in the Los Angeles area, The Sprawwl. She lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters. Find her on Twitter @chloepoet, Instagram at @cmartinez, or her website.
*Note that all three of these poems are from Corner Shrine, winner of the Backbone Press Chapbook Contest, forthcoming in Fall 2020.
In Delhi
Green parakeets! They are here, pecking among the crows.
The tanned ex-pats are running laps, dripping with sweat at 7 AM;
old men practice laugh therapy among the trees; middle-aged walkers
try to follow the stern advice of their doctors, they
swing their arms briskly, huffing along the paths, past gorgeous
ruins of mosques, the tombs of former sultans. Their drivers
wait outside the gates, leaning on the cars and smoking.
We are here too, awake jet-lag early and ready to do
everything at once. Later it will be hot and we will
snap at each other, indecisive about lunch, dehydrated,
but that is not now. Now the temperature is perfect! There are
water-lilies! Our grandmothers on the phone
both said go! Love each other! Enjoy! and we do,
we identify a kingfisher, dogs, Americans, and where can we
get a cup of coffee at this hour? We can’t, this is not
when you go out for coffee in Delhi, everything is closed.
But, parakeets! Air conditioning! Love each other! Let us
get fat on poori and paratha, let us photograph everything
and overpay for rickshaws. Let us rest in the afternoon,
naked in a dim room, ceiling fan humming overhead,
bright racket of motorbikes floating in from the street.
The Emperor Jahangir at Wah Garden
“vah [or wah], interj. 1. splendid! wonderful! 2. goodness!
(expressing astonishment, displeasure, or regret).”
—Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary
An artificial lake full of fat, shining fish: the emperor
was en route from Kashmir to Kabul when he stopped here. A rest
between conquests. In the net they came up open-mouthed, fighting air—
“vah, vah,” breath-syllable that sounds like a gasp, expressive of
wonder, their small suffering incidental—Jahangir, World-Conqueror,
ordered the servants to mark his catch. One by one: through each fish’s
nose they threaded a pearl, and quick while the body still
thrashed a bit, they threw it back—satisfying
plop—and said again, wish astonishment or pleasure
or perhaps with regret, “Vah,” and watched as it hung there,
disoriented, then turned its heavy
bejeweled head and swam down, silvery, indistinct
as a face across a hazy battlefield:
first the moon, then the empty night sky.
Manuscript of a Long-Forgotten Poet
for Jamel
For days we may not speak more than
a few words to anyone but each other.
We leave the hotel in the cool morning and
come back sweaty, drained of energy, to stand
before a huge cage of parakeets, watching them
quickstep sideways along their long stick-perches.
Courting? Fighting? When we wash our hands
we turn the water brown as a flooded field.
We kneel together sometimes for hours
over a low table, as you turn the frail pages
of a book three centuries old and I try to
catch each one and make it stay, sharpening the image
on the camera’s little screen until I can see
the mark someone made in red or black ink,
and where the margin wasn’t ruled straight,
where someone tried to cross a letter out, and didn’t quite—
I adjust the lens, straighten the tripod legs. You hold the page
extra-still. We turn off the ceiling fan, so that even
the air won’t move. The afternoon crawls along, sweltering.
I cannot imagine a more tedious, more tender thing.