Lucifer peeled her
an orange, fed her girl-mouth
kept strangers away.
Some things he could give.
There were blue jays.
He birthed them for her,
barely made the subway
home.
An old woman slept
on his shoulder, gathering ruin.
He loved these children—
his shadow wives.
Only during mercury retrograde
under a shut-off moon would he bring newcomers as tribute,
kept dark
distant from her bedroom.
Grew azaleas & wisteria inside
her bookcase, fastened Christmas lights around the canopy.
Mary loved his pocket watch
its bone fingers would skip
like a record, remind her
of hurricanes taking whole
cities as tribute, shredding pulses
like packages. Lucifer came back
with the clipped wings
of a dove, her lover
climbed on top of her
a candle in each hand.
Left in a room of her own she mourned her mother's
belly, brewed a fear
that she loved a void.
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.