Fame is a Fickle Friend

who saunters on up in a purple-plumed hat,

an aqua-sequined pashmina, mismatched

clip-on chia pets. You thought you were happy

with your thrift-store paisley cap, your unfestooned

lobes, your fifty-cent scarf, but here she is, waving

her bad-ass comet-studded arms, moving toward

your carbon-dark porch, asking you to join her

for a gawk at the summer sky, at Scutum, the sickly,

sick serpent. But each time you think you’ve found

this way-rad, labyrinthine dude, she grabs the map,

points toward something sexier, more bling,

more Christmas-glitzy-snowflake-and-wild-duck rad,

to galaxies named Gangsta, Fuck Yo, That Some Epic Shit.

Fame shows up and suddenly you’re this mangy, fucktard

not-fox—half-crazed and crotchety, shaken and spent.

Fame wants you to come over to her place cuz it’s fleeked,

snatched, boots cool, boots chill, boots slick. You know the rest—

that feeling of having been sucked down a black hole. Less

than minus. Having lost your I’m-nobody-who-are-you? bliss.

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Martha Silano’s posthumous poetry collection Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025) was recently released with another collection Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025) expected in October. Her other books include This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024), Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and in many anthologies. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. 

For More About the Author: www.marthasilano.net.

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