Poem of the Week | February 12, 2024

“Couplets” by Chloe Martinez is our Poem of the Week.

Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at www.chloeAVmartinez.com.
 

Couplets

I have a cup that keeps the coffee
steaming hot for an hour. A gift

from a friend. I like to sit with it
on the couch in the predawn, hopeful,

writing poems. My mother, always leaving
a cooling mug of tea somewhere, rejects

the idea that I buy her one. She says, guess what
I did yesterday? I say, you took a boat

to that little island in the bay. Oh, did I
tell you? she says. Yes, twice. She has

a concussion. It has been a year.
I look up “oldest cup in the world,”

and find an odd giraffe-looking thing,
six inches high on a pedestal

with little holes like a Victorian dress.
Neolithic China. Even older: three cups

made from human skulls, found
in England. The archeological paper

I skim says, “manufacture,” i.e.,
“making by hand,” the surfaces

buffed smooth, the spaces sealed up.
For rituals, scientists guess,

and yes, what could be more sacred
than to cradle a rare liquid inside

that shape? What liquid though. What
were we, then. The modern mind

in its unmanufactured vessel retreats
from the answer, looks around for

a ritual, a spell to stay inside
a temperature-controlled quiet hour

in which my mother does not call to tell me,
again, that she found in a drawer a small box

containing all my baby teeth, and to ask,
now would you like to have them back?
 

Author’s Note

A concussion may or may not completely heal, and its timeline is unpredictable. To make sense of what resists sense, I sometimes look back and around, searching for some context or association that might help me. When I do this in poems, I don’t find answers, but I do begin to feel my way towards my own underlying questions or concerns. Some questions that I think came out of this poem: how did humans start to make things, and can our current skill at making save us, and what happened before, and what happens next?