Twin Babies Named Blue, Born in a Lagoon on the Day of the Eruption
Steam rises out of the rocks,
the crisp rot smell, the light
rain above our
almost nakedness—
half-light, wispy
bluecloud organza, layers
of unknown protection—
our newness unmeant. Long
haired horses roaming picketed
fences unfazed from outside
malevolence, ash collecting itself
like stoic ancient statues
unlamenting. A god
is off killing a lamb
somewhere, then off
to save another.
Golden Years
You are the sun and I am the branch
and the way your voice crackles like rain,
as you say, Sometimes I think god keeps me
here for some reason and I’m failing it so
unlike the way he carried my father up
the marble stairs and made sure the refugee
children made it to the hospital
when they were sick — much like the invisible
pollution weighing down the maple
branches outside your bedroom window
in the Bronx — the holy unction just given to you
from a plastic baggie and playing Ella Fitzgerald
in your room, singing about Paris, and what
gift I could possibly buy you while in a country
you’ll never go in your 100-year-old body —
as if any gift could give you what you deserve.
Minotaur
He sits on top of a crystal
triangle, a labyrinth of glass vines, reflecting
colors of light and speaks
like Wallace Shawn saying only
the glaciers are worthy.
Unfurling
All of it was wrong. At work we talked
about the birds inside of us that
sometimes sing and sometimes yearn
to sleep nestless under a sky without
an atmosphere. Unfurling the wool
felt like a lesson in how to be:
waiting for evolution, an end to a new
beginning. There is nothing I hate more
than being in flux, waiting for something
or nothing that may never come.
Unfurling felt like a dream unbecoming,
a fantasy of the hat having
a life of its own, being worn to cafes,
seeing the same old street corners,
brushing up against different walls,
becoming a new being with it. Now,
a different dream, a fantasy in the
unbeing, furling and unfurling in
perpetuity.
The Liminality Section at JFK
Everything is a metaphor,
even and especially this
poem. Next
to me your back aches, another
metaphor, just like the other
metaphor lost
from us. Only a few
days ago, we were the bearers
of creation. Now
we are bodies full of
metaphors for all that can
be lost. We are in a stateless
place—liminal, almost
unreal—and in these
places, I remember
anything can happen—
another metaphor, a different
kind, a future only
liminality can give you.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who dreams of living inside a seashell. Joanna is the author of several collections including η ψυχή, η ψυχή μας/the soul, our soul. They are the illustrator of Dead Tongue by Bunkong Tuon and Raven King by Fox Henry Frazier. Â