Headlines

By Joanna B. Johnson

It was a fucking disaster, leaving 

him for her. The loudest headlines read: 

Snake, witch, vixen, zorrita. I tried to 

recalibrate my heart, tried to shake her 

from my hair like sand. Squeezed 

my eyes, my chest, my fists,

released—there she was again.

Walls whispered theories: easy 

prey, bruja, Stockholm syndrome. 

Drown the affair in the Mediterranean. 

If it floats, kill it; if it sinks

it was already dead. Everyone waited

for me to repent, return to safety, return 

to him. We all face the same questions 

of how to make a home, where,

with whom, at what expense. Why 

her? They asked. Why now? It was like this: 

You know the stories of people 

who see someone caught under a car; 

how with the strength of a thousand 

frothing horses, they lift the two-ton hunk

of metal off the ground to free the living 

being trapped beneath? November on a 

park bench, our shivering hearts held in 

pewter cups, the frost swallowing 

the orange trees one by one, her lips  

blue. I dove into the cold sea, emerged boiling, 

lifting above my head this waterlogged love.

We surfaced with mouths of mud, knees 

raw from begging for forgiveness, heaved

ourselves onto the shore, sucking air 

into the rattle of our ribs, lungs filling,

my chest rising, yelling into the sky

I choose you! I choose you! I choose

me. She is kissing the red of my knees, 

dripping with salt water, we are chewing

up all the apologies, spitting them out, 

licking our salt-stung hearts. There are no

headlines for the tender ways we will 

build ourselves a home again.


Joanna B. Johnson (she/her) is a Spanish-English bilingual educator with a Masters in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education from the University of Washington. She was runner up for the 2019 Wasafiri/Queen Mary New Writing Prize in Poetry and winner of the F(r)iction Winter 2019 Poetry Contest. Her writing can be found in Midway Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Meridian and The Minnesota Review (forthcoming). She works as a teacher and translator in Córdoba, Spain where she lives with her partner and their dog, Chispa. When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found running in the sierra of Córdoba.

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