Diane K. Martin

​Bees and Apple Trees

The bees in the field blanketing the orchard are awakened by the yellow clarion of mustard. The blare also wakes the old, gnarled apple trees. Rise and shine! Get ready to bloom! In a few years, growers will consider you a bad investment and will fetch their chainsaws. Your limbs will be sold for firewood. The growers will plow your roots—tangled with mustard’s—with big yellow earth movers. They will plant Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, and Merlot. Farmers will become vintners. Wine tasters will flock there from the city like bees to the mustard.
 
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The Child
 
They bought the child, the birth family’s thirteenth and a girl. Liliana was so tiny, closed in the baby carrier in Andrea’s jacket, nestled in Andrea’s generous bosom, you couldn’t tell a baby was being carried at all. As generous as her bosom, Andrea left two cartons of Marlboros and a bottle of Bushmill’s (minus one thimbleful) with the custom official who checked the bags. Thank God Liliana hadn’t squalled through customs or the 9-hour flight from Sao Paulo. Andrea and the child made it to the parking lot and George’s Volvo. It was the beginning of the rest of the story.
 
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Practice

How’d she get such neat script? Practice, she says, like how you get to Carnegie—oh, never mind. Yes, she worked on aligning curves, keeping loops consistent, evenly spaced, the slant modest, bring careful not to overlap ascenders and descenders—a cursive so flawless, she forged notes for schoolmates, signed their mothers’ names—you know, with (Mrs.) in parentheses, a good practice for The Future, she figured, the married name next to hers a Beatle’s or some other star’s.
 
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Remi, for Remission

The man in brown overalls was gladness. What he loved touched everything. What a fine day, he said every day. We are so lucky, he said, a tall man, throwing his arms to the sky. He named the dog Remi, for remission. Maybe you say the man has changed since she left; when the pain got unbearable, she wasn’t there anymore. Now when he walks back from the cafe, Remi leads. The man is about a foot shorter than he was before.
 
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Largo

Those green-grass days of Rochester’s wife igniting, sprinkler playing the largo of summer—you were Jane burning but not consumed. The tulips you planted were only imagined, mind bearing down. But oh the struggle to push them into the tick of time passing.
 
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Sawdust Days

The aproned man in the A&P weighed out four pounds of onions, six Cortland apples, eight tomatoes—ripe, but not too—and placed them in paper bags he marked with the China marker from his shirt pocket. Sawdust on his work boots, on Mom’s low-heeled pumps, on my black & white saddle shoes.
 
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Hook and Eye

She lifts the grocery bags from the shopping cart into the trunk of the Corolla, adjusts the strap that slips off her left shoulder and the elastic that cuts her back. How many times has she fastened hook and eye? And unfastened them? And sworn she would fix it all? One day she is sure she will. Hook and eye, hook and eye.
 
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Poems by Diane K. Martin have recently appeared in the American Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Diode, Field, Kenyon Review, Laurel Review, Plume, Rhino, and among many other journals and anthologies. Her nonfiction prose has appeared in Connotation Press, The Rumpus, The Establishment, VIDA, New World Writing, and Tin House and her fiction has appeared in Narrative Northeast. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press. Her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published in March 2020 by MadHat Press. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.