BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
-Jillian Richardson wrote about being sexually harassed at work at Quartz:
"The owner never said that he was sorry for the incident , and, to my knowledge, never did anything to address the situation. I sat there the rest of the day, furious. I had no idea what else I could do, except never give them my business again."
-T. Kira Madden wrote about sexual assault, the loss of her dad, and how love feels at Guernica:
"Fifteen years later, you are twenty-seven years old, a writer, and your father has just died. You are in an isolated artist colony in New Hampshire in the dead snap of winter, here to finish another book you have failed to finish, and you sob yourself to sleep every night, thinking about how much you miss your father—his big arms, your smallness. While browsing through old emails one night, you find a message in your spam box.
It’s Chad.
It is dated one year ago, almost to the day.
It says, I need you to forgive me for the things that have happened. It is my one wish."
-The New Yorker rounded up the year in poetry they published. I love Lynn Melnick's poem:
"Say yes
so I let him run me to the limits
in a pickup though I know better
than to expect
the chaparral
to grow much through trauma
except in order to withstand
extinction"
-Amanda Knox on why women confess to crimes they didn't commit at Broadly:
"We are all of us social animals, conditioned to please and comply with authority figures—such as police officers. But compliance and suggestibility aren't hardwired traits: We're taught them. "Men hold higher status in society, so have more power," Alice H. Eagly, a psychology and gender studies professor at Northwestern University, tells me. "Women are commonly in roles that involve caring and cooperation. Expectations are formed for men to be more influential and women more easily influenced.'"
-Janice Sapigao talks politics and gaslighting on Entropy:
"I don’t want to get into what being a woman of color means as that information is available for folks on the internet. Knowing that ‘woman of color’ is a political identity is essential to understanding why we are so often silenced, or told to be silent, or told to accept white mediocrity, or told to get used to bullshit."
-Monica Lewis has a poem up at Breadcrumbs Mag:
"she wakes with a metal tongue & all day it sticks, rust-smacking she struggles to stop the rot that's all chemically composed, hard-wired in science & skin. at this point there's no point for a hug or mouth that mouths i understand, she understands each day she must swallow desert, let it cake through her veins, cut out starfish flesh & worship the sun."
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (2016, ELJ Publications), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, Pouch, and elsewhere. She also teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets.