Good Want

Domenica Martinello’s Good Want explores how precarity can shape one’s relationship to desire, language, and valuation—cultural, moral, and aesthetic. The speaker’s ancestors and family are invoked as harbingers of want, rewriting the known:

My mother had a bad childhood.
I’ve trained myself to kill it
with beautifully curated
charcuterie boards.

Feminizing inherited notions of “good” with returns to nascent girlhood and the female body (“disrobed in one endless uncoiling peel”), she engages in questions of use: “Utility feels safe […] all-encompassing,” and “I refuse to be useful only / in the rear-view of my strife.”

Good Want’s dueling pulls of consumption and abstention (“I wanted to marry myself // to a profession / of kneeling”) fuel an ouroboric self-conception:

Asleep I flick and lash

the air from memory
and face the forked

path like an old enemy
before eating my own tail.

Martinello’s wit shines in “On the Day Mary Oliver Died,” moving from the domestic, “hands plunged into the soapy sink water of it all,” to the body metaphorized as a “little pageant dog,” to a refusal of professorial condescension: 

if you find this trite that’s on you
blood drips pastorally down my leg

And, from “Hot Pump”:

Money can’t buy class.
It’s inherited genetically.

Tough titties,
my ancestors might say.

With acuity, the poet plies the spaces between truth and deceit, music and meaning. “[A]n iconic image / is a thing forced to go on meaning forever,” she writes, and,

I’ve stretched baloney, conceptually,
as far as it can be stretched.
I commit myself

to showing my work
even if the answer is wrong.

Extending her topoi to form (“We grow around / our constraints”), Martinello traces the reverb between poetry, prayer, and syllabics (“Have you been counting? / Stressed, unstressed”), as ritualized practices and tests of credulity:

Poetry often feels to me like
clicking the beads of a rosary
[…]

I’ve no faith in the abacus
or alphabet, a meek and useless

sonnet.

Good Want, a sustained ars poetica, interrogates its own interventions with aplomb:

God, bless this strange bread. I accept
the dough I’ve been given.

I am the caretaker of good and bad
and I loosen their reins.