BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
As the senior managing editor at Luna Luna and the founding editor at Yes Poetry, you could say writing is important to me, especially poetry. For me, it’s vital to highlight poetic voices in order to support literature, activism, and expression.
Here are three of my favorite poems I read recently.
Dujie Tahat - “during mass”
“The word of God
still rings in that room
up in the rafters somewhere
like wedding bells at a winery
like I’ve never been married
in a church before
no matter how much she begged.”
Cynthia X. Hua - “Lightning Folk”
“It’s death outside
but each passing headlight
is a howl through the canyons.
The universe makes a thousand copies of everything:
flat scrub grass, sawtooth mountains
paper bag bush
and the desert woolly star.”
Adrian Ernesto Cepeda - “She Looks at Me Like I’m Poetry”
“I never resist—as if she’s spreading
my lips and between each breath,
she reads me nakedly, so much
skin within the body rhythms
in our rhyming verses,
and for that moment, on her
white sheets, no longer invisible—
I finally exist.”
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos, No(body) (forthcoming, Madhouse Press, 2019), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault. They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Them, Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente / FB: joannacvalente