SEA, SWALLOW US & TURN US INTO CHERRY BLOSSOMS
You'd said you'd fall and I wanted to say, please
so I can carry your body into a tub full of soaked ivy holding together
a milky sea
of mirrors and all the mosaic shards foaming into nothing, a wave
pushing into our bodies because we don't know what else to be
but laying silent, cut open by alienlike light, colors shredding
us open and apart into a being
shapeless, many names, no names, cherry blossoms like ouroboros,
a home underneath the moon
crescent, split open and you are a moon
I want to live on
and it's scary to be alive and feel the blunt edges of everything
that's ever followed you, hands and mouths and eyes and faces
of people you knew and never dreamt of, ghosts without place
and when I stuck my finger inside your mouth on Humboldt St
pointed and dragging
out something of you, I couldn't help but fall finger-first inside your body,
not caring about finding my way back out,
only oozing into every bit of you like it's every bit of me,
mirrors breaking and fusing, shards reflecting new shards, fissures
of a color
found deep in a sea we've long drowned in before
we were ever aware.
CAN YOU TAKE A PICTURE OF THE MOON
We are always in rooms and we are hardly ever ourselves
with other people in rooms
that are closed and our hands don’t exist
and we can’t remember if we ever had bodies
or if we were always just in a dark room
asking, who was lonely first?
Inside someone’s belly there is you and we are connected
and there is a lot of blood but we don’t know where it came from
or who it belongs to or how we own it. And there is your body
and there is my body on top of it
and then there are waves—
but you are not part of them.
What does it mean to know someone else’s body
like spatial memories of your grandmother’s kitchen, the smell of zucchini
bread and cigarettes and the desire for emptiness
like you never existed
even though I trace your outline
in the dark
and what do you say to the waiter who asks your name
and you are scared and I am scared like the first day of school
and because of that we’re not scared because it’s silly to feel around in the dark
for the same thing without realizing we’re the same thing.
How can you be different if there are no such things
as bodies?
You say sorry for hitting the dog once, that time you cheated,
because your rapist went free
so you sit by the ocean lighting bone hoping
to molt into a new body before mercury retrograde
because even lizards know not to fuck with the stars
and you’re waiting for the water to bubble up and spill
over so you finally choke.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body) (forthcoming, Madhouse Press, 2019), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault. They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Them, Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente / FB: joannacvalente