RODGER MARTIN
"Blueberry Barrens"
Like Bronte’s moors, all ruddy maroon, all Heathcliffe
the blueberry barrens stretch horizon to horizon
close-cropped to the earth. Dirt tracks mark mile
upon mile of rutted paradise like a Sunday’s military
firing range. Migrant barracks hide on the edges
far from good roads--far from tasty bites of muffins
amid sips of hot tea--a pretense of peace and place.
Alone, the frittata’s sauce touches the need
to believe. Taste deep as tongue spreads
down the spine’s pores and hungers
like an aborigine, crouched before red
sandstone hungers, the sound
of his digiri bounding, winding
across the scrub. He sniffs,
fresh from the outback’s oven,
his olfactory rising like bread.
Alone, a dark glass of Montepulciano
worships mystery beneath a vineyard moon.
Like a wolf’s yowl echoes across an escarpment,
it yearns for the ears of its partner
trotting the edge where she pauses
to let the warm breeze rise
and rustle the ruff of her neck.
Alone, an orange cuts freshness into rosettes
like a jaguar silently padding a river’s bank.
Its yellow eyes scrutinize the least uncertainty
ready to spring, to lock jaws
‘round a cranium of doubt and with one
omniscient bite, convert the mind’s shell first
into lunch, then into life, and last into thought.
"A poet must brunch alone"
Dublin, N.H.
The trattoria— crossword of the nose,
intersection of the taste, mirror
where tongue and ear meet eye while plates serve song,
And song sings pasta. Kitchens stage three-part
Syncopated feasts, and singers salad up
Big-Daddy-oh eat at the bar while musicians
Swizzle picks over strings with dessert for a star.
And in the blue room an aristocratic carafe
of nebbiolo Barolo softens light
and mysteries between lovers’ words, a brush
like a double-pawed cat curling among the tables,
nuzzling, kneading our muzzles to a satisfied purr.
"For Del Rossi’s Homemade Pasta"
Originally appeared in Chrysanthemum Review, 2020
Fourteen bison, Hancock, New Hampshire,
lounge lush bottomlands along Valley Road.
Five cows, nine calves: shaggy, black, confident,
their humps mock the grass castrated bovines
have grazed where Currier and Ives prefer
lithographs to these socialists’ frosty breath.
And now non-virtual, two dimensional Silicon Valley
screeds disrupt them to asylums for the deranged.
Yes, the pacified cattle still graze one meadow,
facsimiles to these powder-horned beasts
munching, ignoring white fences. Both feed
me, but bison gore holes in closed houses,
shove me out into dawn, beneath blue sky
and green canopies where a chipmunk’s scratching
taps to the full-throated flute of the thrush.
One must awake bird misty and early worm
to unlock the sleep-clogged brain slurping above
a cream-colored, china bowl edged with blue design
that captures all our stories and swirls them inside.
Fill it with Krispies, sugar, and milk.
Next add atmosphere, galactic space, even jello
might float, but best let those grains note
their pearl-cultured feast, and pound that Java
where diked paddies mirror the green deep
of sharp Tao hills laced with strands of cloud
which ghost the pagodas cragged beyond steep.
O, if one could, like Buddha, dig a spoon
into the belly of the universe, then might one tune
the after this life and “Snap, crackle, and pop!”
"RICE KRISPIES"
MORE ABOUT RODGER MARTIN
Rodger Martin’s For All The Tea in Zhōngguó, 2019, follows The Battlefield Guide, and the selection of The Blue Moon Series by Small Press Review as a bi-monthly picks of the year. His newest book, The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec, was shortlisted for the 2024 Granite State Poetry Book Award and published by NatureCulture books in 2025. He received the 2024 Stanley Kunitz Medal and an Appalachia award for poetry. His work has been extensively translated and published in China where he has participated in the pastoral poetry exchange of poets between China and the United States. He’s a recipient of numerous fellowships. He was Managing Editor of The Worcester Review for twenty-seven years. His first collection, A Martian Perspective: The Nemo Poems, was published in 1990 as a result of winning a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship in fiction and a new and revised edition by NatureCulture Books came out in 2025.