JoAnna Novak

Summer 2024 | Poetry

Two Poems

Lob

 

It feels good

to smash,

 

rocket earth,

bouncing

 

we burn

calories

 

I don’t

care. Thinking

 

: buy flowers

for my son.

 

The smoking

woman plucks

 

in-growns

from my calves

 

and tells me

she doesn’t

 

want kids

but

 

she loves people

who love kids.

 

Was my mother

into me,

 

did she say

a positive

 

thing? Lob

an easy happy

 

my way? One

minute she cried

 

on the phone,

scared, the next

 

at the zoo.

Before showering

 

I bounce, naked,

practicing my shot

 

until the volley

became automatic:

 

forehand left

foot, backhand

 

step right, twist,

stiffen wrist,

 

throw a medicine ball

of molten blood

 

into the maternaverse.

She knows me

 

little, least of all

my love for the hopper.

 


Comma, With a Line From Bruce Nauman

 

I need to learn a lifetime

how to pause and separate

 

the picture of you lithe in Ojai

from the picture of me bleeding

 

down my thighs. I need

to itemize my desire—

 

an abandoned estate,

close to the coast,

 

a demotion, my hands

on the backs of your knees,

 

hot. A quick lesson

on subordination: press

 

yourself against the blackboard.

This may become an erotic experience.

JoAnna Novak is the author of memoir Contradiction Days: A Writer on the Verge of Motherhood. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her fourth book of poetry, DOMESTIREXIA, will be published by Soft Skull Press in 2024.

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