I Eat In Bed With The Lights Off, Just Like When We Have Sex
<
Turn up at low tide
against your will.
You are too young to know what
will is.
We’re nobody nowhere
right now
on a ship neither sinking or floating
in a desert, under a desert
there are eyes watching us.
Our eyes are closed.
>
(
I want a new moon baby, I’m a new
moon baby.
I’m a moon inside a planet that is
dying
and there are no babies
left in this planet anymore.
)
I took down your photo from my desk
like it was never there
replaced by space. Empty space is better
than men who don’t try.
[
I ignore
what my husband did to me
when he took all of the photos of us down
for another version
of me
the version that is better and younger
and better at sex
than me.
{
A man once told
me he wanted to leave his wife for me
&
live in Europe on a boat somewhere.
That was happiness for him.
But he couldn’t.
I mostly
still love him.
}
<<
I tell you the truth.
I want to see
what no one else sees.
I want to see what you see.
I don’t care if you die before me.
I want to see something
and tell you what it feels like.
I want to tell you.
Don’t be afraid to let your body die.
My body died on a moon
volcanic radiation like your body
an unlikely destination for
life.
Like my womb. Like your body.
>>
{{ Don’t be afraid of
your deaths. }}
Holyplanets, stars & you, dear Algol, dear Asteria
But here is the birth of a new story.
Let me tell it to you:
Once there was a body made
by the rings of Saturn, a star separated
into two stars, genderless, shapeless
architecture, a thing, the thing,
a house, holy, holier than two
because one is the only
number that can be holy
but now two, the architect said, here
let them find each other
even if it takes a millennia—
all of time, sideways and backwards
;;;;;
And eventually the star, the two
disembodied stars, find each other
as humans
with matching thunderstorms inside, beachmoon
smoke and salt instead of bones
binding them together in death, afterdeath
and beforedeath
and the sun is out like a swan’s broken neck
and a car alarm is going off
and they are walking down a street somewhere
and sometimes they are smiling
and they aren’t perfect but they are perfect
and this moment in time is perfect
and it is the thing that will matter
in all of time even when their bodies
rot even when their bodies are full of rage
as if rage is the only thing
to fill them up, like only left pieces of rib.
;;;;;
And in another space of time, their bodies are being made
and split apart over and over and over again
and Saturn’s rings spin and dance purplesilver, a thing in space,
nothing more beautiful
and one of the stars says, I do not separate
you from me:
first feast, a ceiling fan circling for eternity
&
God and their angels, swans with broken necks
learn how to dance every dance.
;;;;;
There is a thunderstorm when the two stars
kiss, a poem whose infrastructure is a body—
your body, one star says, before I knew it was yours,
our bodies in Scorpio’s moons.
If bodies are lines, eternal beasts lit like stars,
then my body is yours,
so say a prayer
because I’ve always loved you—
I’ve had no choice
once the first prayer was born,
spoken as a monument that stopped our bodies
in time, along with all the other bodies
and stars before us
lost in a cemetery, their energies and ours
locked in a timeless
architect’s dream.
Under my architecture, you rise like a demon
once lost but now found, simmering
twilight leaking—
and what is the difference between demons
and angels?
None I tell you.
It was just a story some humans
told, wrote down like a breeze,
like poison wafting till turned.
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.