Rejection letter
god has a hypothesis, and the break of its heart is like waves on a little ocean:
they lap at the salt of your skin, eat at the iron of your blood, over & over. you, like every shoreline,
a victim to the pressured touch of something outside itself that becomes itself, becomes itself.
if god wore a jacket, they’d fold it up, this hypothesis, fold it a thousand times and tuck
it in the pocket over their left breast, so that it’d fall out onto a disco-lit dance floor
at a least opportune moment in some little dive on the beach where a jacket would be a big deal.
by the end of the night, though, damp, crumpled, it’d always get picked up: swept out
of whatever stumbled corner next the drained starless martini glasses & blank napkins and shoved
back in place, the sad crooning on the speakers invariably Patsy Cline.
to be clear, the stumbling has always been yours, but it could be god’s. hold that modal
up to the light, the gem of its lips pressing against your pulse. how you howl, another wild thing
chasing sunshine up another mountain, hunting down applause for the way they fall.
god expects no less. the paper is ringed in palimpsests. the color of its ink has no name.
as if to say: you exist, but you don’t. on any given day, the grist of your existence a tide pulling, glass
being crushed to sand. how’s that for a metaphor? god asks, makes another note in the margin.
Joanna Lee is a founder of the Richmond, Virginia community River City Poets, and earned her MD from the Medical College of Virginia and a Master’s in neuroscience from William & Mary. Her work has been published in JAMA, Rattle, Contemporary American Voices, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. A four-time alum of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project, she is the author of the chapbook Dissections, a co-editor of the anthology Lingering in the Margins; and the current Poet Laureate for the city of Richmond.