Green Linden Press

American Dream

The American dream is a collective dream
of falling through the navy blue stars
and the branches of the elms, long dead
and eaten. Every night, I lay my big
American head on my memory
pillow. I am a late fall bloomer:

an aster, last in my pot of blooms,
the nightshades, cosmos. They may dream
of my cats, Dante and Cosmo. Their memory
hurts: my poet boy, my cluster of stars.
This country is too vast, too American: big
teeth, smiles, big steaks, big cars, big dead

classrooms, churches, nightclubs. I’m dead
wrong to claim that you, friends, bloom
sad as I. But America has always been big,
my country, the only one I know. I dreamt,
I woke, groped for my zodiac book, my star
guide with the blue cover. I remembered

my dream of lactating ink, my mammary
glands old, the sacs sturgid and flat, dead,
needing release. What does this mean? The stars
told a different story: a bruise may bloom
on your American ego. Don’t covet or jinx. My dreams
are American. They decided to sail across that big

blue ocean to visit my ancestors. I begged
dead relatives I’ll never know to remember
their long nights, their national dreams
of pregnancy, snakes, teeth that loosen and die
from bad un-American insurance. A bloom
of venom, of disease. The teeth fall like stars.

Lately, my dreams are wet and star
hungry Americans, all their bellies swollen big
with gunmetal pride. Our babies bloom
American milk teeth. But I barely remember
this when I wake. The nights seem deadened,
timeless, the propofol dream

from a doctor’s needle. Time falls dead like a star,
blooms dreamless twilight. I can’t
remember anywhere as big as America.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, winner of the Small Harbor Press open reading, In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mates, and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Atticus Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time,Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023