Below on earth, humans are
in metal boxes
pretending to be an image
of gods in air.
Humans are not
meant to be birds, they are not
even them enough
to be an image of us.
Whose plan was this the whole
thing anyway? Time? Those alien lights
in the sky are seventy percent
water, thirty percent waste, so
who are they when they are not
themselves?
They look to the sky
for answers not realizing we were
never the answer
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and 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) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente