Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (Operating System, 2017), Sexting the Dead (Unknown Press, 2018), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes, Poetry and the managing editor for Civil Coping Mechanisms and Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, BUST, Spork Press, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente
Read MoreYes, It Happened to Me...I Was Sexually Assaulted on the Subway
Some might think New York City is an odd oasis from California, but undisturbed subway rides allowed my mind to wander the way it never could in Los Angeles traffic. I was in my 20s, relatively young to my transplant to New York City, when I rode the subway half a dozen times a day for multiple part-time jobs. I worked with patients in community mental health clinics throughout the city, and with this hectic schedule, the subway afforded me an ironic luxury of being lost in my thoughts.
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Anna Marcell
What I’ve Learned from Dating Women Who Have Been Raped
In the way you would tense your muscles to hold your bones as the train comes towards you, you tried to keep her inside the devout armor of you. But she had her own. You are just as woman and susceptible, anyway.
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Aela Labbe
A Catalogue of Sex
I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t look away. My breast buds were sad little stubs above my rounded belly. My glasses left a raw red mark on the bridge of my nose. My nose and forehead were shiny, my hair scraped back into a ponytail. I had never been a pretty child.
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Aleah Michele
I Was Abused...I Think
As I sat there feeling a familiar ache inside me, an old memory came to me, without my calling, often like these memories do. I must have been ten or twelve years old in the memory, and I could see myself in my maternal grandmother’s house. I used to often spend my summer vacations with my maternal relatives. I guess my parents needed some time off me, as I did off them. I wouldn’t mind spending the days there, as it meant no more evenings full of terror-filled waiting as I dreaded the sound of the doorbell and the state my father would walked in, and the fights between my parents that followed. I felt invisible and doomed.
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