WHEN MY HUSBAND COMES HOME AND MAKES ME PUT ON A CHEERLEADER OUTFIT AND CALLS ME VANESSA
He comes into
the room and I
don’t say
it’s the wrong name
because it won’t matter.
He’ll say it anyway.
Maybe it’s the right one
and my body is dressed
like a tiny satan coiling
over a man’s heart the way
satan says what you’ve
always wanted and gives
you exactly
the thing
and you are the thing
for him and you want to be
that thing for him more than
you’ve wanted to be alive,
wrong name or not.
Because none of that matters.
All that matters is
what you call each other
without opening your mouths
or breathing
without being
commanded.
MY DUMB HUSBAND IS FROM THE MOON
In a dream I am a
letter to you and I am mailed
to the moon
where you live and
sometimes you read me, so clumsy
with the things in
your hands
but it’s a clumsy that
begins with love and doesn’t end
like a song, a kind of
blues like a pristine
corpse who only
remembers when Bruce Springsteen said,
when you’re alone,
you’re alone.
You tell me you are
afraid of being alone and I stroke
your face and tell you
not to be afraid of that anymore.
I can breathe on the
moon, I say, somehow.
Maybe I was born here,
I say. Maybe you created me
in from an ocean on
the moon that no longer exists
because I stole all
the water from it, ribs built
from fish that used to
be alive. My body is open
like a casket waiting
for another body
to inhabit it, a swell
of salt, a thing that can’t be named
as holy but it’s the
holiest thing I’ve ever tasted
in a mouth built for
waters sinful as the first bite
into a nectarine, held
in the body like choking,
a kind of blood that
burns like wild fires
wanting to be held by
arms that can’t hold them, a contradiction
like water on the
moon, and here is my body
that is from the moon
that is from you and I don’t know how else
to be held.
Bio:
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Joanna is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015) Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018), No(body) (Madhouse Press, 2019), and #Survivor (The Operating System, 2020). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing By Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 