Author’s Note:
November 21, 2022
This morning, when I turned to my wife to share the good news about these poems finding a home while she was reading the news, she paused, turned to me, and shared about the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. It's important for me to enter this space with empathy and compassion for the pain and suffering and death that happened just yesterday. I wish the death and constraint was only in the poems, but here we are with it all around us—invading our LGBTQ+ spaces.
Pain washes over us today. Last night's devastating hate crime makes it hard to find joy in the timing of my poems being accepted for publication. These poems don't embrace joy at their core, but they do speak to pain, perseverance, survival... It's always time to build strength and to have more representation for all our LGBTQ+ families, but, shit, the hate and attacks are killing us. This is to say, let’s stand in solidarity as we Out these two very gay poems into a world where hate is clearly running rampant. Maybe our act of poetry can be an offering of strength for our LGBTQ+ communities as we mourn and show up for each other in these terrible times when hate intrudes what needs to be safe and sacred LGBTQ+ space.
In Solidarity,
Nicole Santalucia
TNS Statement:
In the wake of the hate crime in Colorado Springs, The Normal School stands in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community. While we cannot repair the irreparable damages hate has caused the community, TNS remains steadfast in our commitment to continue to support voices like Nicole Santalucia and other members of the LGBTQIA+ community by providing a platform for their voices to be heard. In times like these, it is even more important for communal voices to be uplifted. Thank you for continuing to support TNS and we hope you, too, stand in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community. Help us both continue to redefine Normal.
Conversations in the Garden
I never thought I’d wake up with fruit in my pants and hear corn ring like a telephone. The lettuce is getting louder. The metallic underbelly of the raspberry bush rests on my tongue. I am not sure how to answer the corn, but now that I am here, I will pick and eat its ear.
The tomatoes are prostituting, and the fava beans popping. Which is to say, I garden now, and sometimes I forget that I used to fill my pockets with fruit and smash my fists against my body. I carry a ten-dollar bill in my sock and a picture of you in my shoe. A tribute to Bernice on her 80th birthday. To love in the shape of feet is to kick heaven right in the puff.
It must be our anniversary, all the tomatoes burst this morning. The sky yellow and purple flesh. Lesbians spread their seed under bruised clouds. We stand in the middle of everything, in a garden next to the carrots in a box behind a fence. The neighbors weed around our ankles, stare out their kitchen windows, while the gay rain beats on our gay heads.
autopsy report as drug addict, lesbian, thief
then a saint, which is really a thief. then wife and a wife’s wife. then sister of an addict and granddaughter of an alcoholic. then addict again. my own alcoholism. then sober. then woman, not in the way of suffering or resentment, but in the way of queer and of magic. take a fistful of dirt and poof. druggysissyfaggot. homolesbodyke. in the garden with tomatoes. vines twist around my ankles. fat fruit falls on my head.
not the moon with fire and women, but the artificial round lunation without a face. a bunch of phony alcoholics. the gift of not dying after 7pm. when the horizon shrinks the kitchen table. my neck like the arc of a question. stained red. yellow all over. an afterthought. soapy water. a fool in my throat. suffocating while suffocating. then wet brain. then elephants in my ankles. and spiders in my veins. then the end of summer. I am. here. a witness to birds in the backyard. luxury. survival. and tomorrow when I go back to work as a thief, I will rip off one more day. keep all the fruit to myself. which is a trick way of saying: the plums were so delicious. just for today I won’t pick up a drink or a drug. forgive me.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Diode, as well as other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
Photo by ehsan hasani