JOANNA C. VALENTE
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I'm Writing a Poem About You in a Shitty Starbucks in Midtown |
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When I told you I wanted to hate
you, I wasn’t lying. It’s the fortieth anniversary of someone’s marriage, the years bleeding into each other like veins falling apart after taking too many selfies & realizing I am not a red head & you will never love me & I will never be Mama. - In Boston, a man sat for five hours in the Worcester library, waiting for pretty girls to operate a new body. He asked J why she was alone because pretty girls should never be alone & she was too pretty for him to concentrate & she should take a walk with him in the park & all good girls are from somewhere else & where are you from, honey, you must be from somewhere too beautiful to be real, he said, where humans eat their young & stuff the bones in a giant crate in the earth. J knows no one really lives & this is how she will die. - You took my face in yr hands & put it on & said that I am not a human. So I believed you mostly because our hands are the same size. Sometimes, at night, I wish for someone to break into me-- stab my body before my body turns on itself, before the waiter writes a ghost story on a napkin before you become angry with your dead & complain of hunger on the beach-- they are still dead & they are still your parents. There is no gravity in you & whose heart is on trial anyway? |
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Your Body Doesn't Matter
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If the dead never dissolve,
they must float from Mars to Jupiter blossoming into new life: bees, tritium, woman’s rib & live off a feast of bionic hearts crystallizing into brain matter, surrendering to choking—no rehearsal of minds—no collecting of seashells because we are afraid of our feelings when there is no later—a dream of rebirth? There are none in a bar called Sea Witch in Brooklyn in house gin in drowning in discarded deer husks merging on the BQE with hands everywhere inside kidneys inside uterine wall birthing ghosts without a back story-- O my dark, engulf them—this earth, these undead—scientists were wrong about how to supersede time & space & light, how becoming takes longer than being alive: the hands crushing you into love that you didn’t want & I told mother I would become the most harmless thing in the world-- there is no universe. |
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I ONLY BELIEVE IN PSYCHICS WHEN THEY TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD WILL HAPPEN
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It’s 11:38 PM outside in the garden
overflowing with couples complaining about their spouses & using the weather to talk about their feelings as if it’s a good idea to learn braille just to touch another person without letting go of all your secrets at once like opening a jar full of mosquitoes & now you forgot what desire is for other people because after three weeks, you don’t remember how to use words to name how sex on the patio furniture felt in February, how your mind kept racing to remember all of the Spanish words you learned in 9th grade & K was asleep when you wanted to have sex that last time. We were out there for too long, staring all night into woodless forest in 21st century America when Brooklyn is metal & nobody & words are for other people not us, who learn more words for all of the feelings that consume us, that we can’t see like the ghosts in your grandmother’s basement & where are your ghosts when you need them? |
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JOANNA C. VALENTE is sometimes a mermaid and sometimes a human. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014) and received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her second collection Marys of the Sea is forthcoming from ELJ Publications in 2016. Some of her work appears, or is forthcoming, in The Huffington Post, Columbia Journal, Similar Peaks, The Paris-American, The Atlas Review, The Destroyer, among others. In 2011, she received the American Society of Poet’s Prize. She founded Yes, Poetry in 2010,and is the Managing Editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Her ghost resides at her website: joannavalente.com.
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