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.