There is a girl who stands
under an umbrella
and she has no parents, just ghosts
in a house with nothing
to do but wail and move
her shit around to scare her.
There are 3.9 joules
of nitrogen in the vacuum between
her breasts
and her wet shoes.
She doesn’t remember
what her parents look like anymore
or what they should
look like
or what they liked to eat.
She hears a rat chewing
on the insides
of a nonexistent heart.
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