Martha Silano

Pain Is the Foundation

Instead of a uterus, a small and inconspicuous moth,
a moth at the mouth of my womb, a cervix like a walrus’s nose.
Instead of a body, a broken communion wafer, the broken body

of a man on a cross who touched your lip
to remove a crumb, touched it and everything changed.
From then on you could love another, a flock of starlings,

a house blacker than the eaves. Pain
is the foundation; relief is the roof you dream
of jumping off. Life begins and ends in a church

of redwoods, where you do and do not grow a storm.
Your beauty’s like the moss on a rock on a rainy day.
Something is hidden between your ribs. It’s a purple violet, a smudge

of violent, a rib not a rib but a star.
You can hear the hummingbird’s not-quite
song, that buzzy ticking. It’s like you could

box them up, a menagerie of iridescent wings;
it’s like you could love the whole lot of them, each beak,
each one’s desire for the nectar in the fuchsia’s long-tubed blooms;

it’s like they all belong
in a museum curated by llamas
who will never escape their muddy corral,

though perhaps someday
someone will hold open the gate,
welcome them into the darkening day.

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Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Martha’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New England Review and AGNI, among others. Honors include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Poetry. Her work appears in over three-dozen print anthologies, including The Best American Poetry series. Martha has received writing fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others, and she spent eight months in Oregon’s Wild and Scenic Rogue River Canyon as the 2004 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency recipient. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. Learn more about Martha and her work at marthasilano.net.