There is a baby crying. You are not the baby
crying and you aren’t sure it’s actually

a real baby but you are told it’s there,
you are told a family buried their baby in
the baseball field, because a bunch of boys

found a small, misshapen hand at the home base
and it’s too absurd to be real—you are a scientist
that’s what you tell yourself every night.

You tell yourself a lot of lies. You do this
so you can wake up in the morning and put on
your lipstick and high heels and pray

to something up in the sky although you don’t
trust the sky anymore and really, the only

thing you trust is a man named Fox
but even he disappoints you sometimes.

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.