All My Iguanas

It’s like watching something crawl out of the heart.
       — Andy Einhorn, musical director,
       on Audra McDonald’s performance in Gypsy

When Audra McDonald performed
the final song in Gypsy, Rose’s Turn,
she said the audience watched her
go all the way down to where the iguanas play.
I’ve known those iguanas.

And I want you to know me, but these lines hurt.
I don’t want to relive my first husband
leaving me for his sister-in-law.
So I’ll only tell you that he died a year later,
and I argued with his new wife about which font
to use on his gravestone.

I could tell you how I moved across the country
for a married ex-heroin addict. We broke up
before the wheels of my plane touched down.
I had two young daughters still grieving their dead father.
We were in Greensboro, North Carolina,
and I, their mother, was a bereft fool.
A widow, not a widow. No job, no friends.

I didn’t look for danger, but isn’t love always dangerous?
Like when I fell for my 17-year-old student,
how we wrote emails to each other for two years.
No one believes a high school senior
could have a crush on a 60-year-old. Believe it.

In this moment, I’m like Rose,
shattered and standing in front of my audience.
What will I do next? Take off my clothes?
I’m already naked, something crawling out of my heart.

What do you still want to know?
Did I ever touch the student?
I did not, though I still imagine those possible sins.
And yes, the second wife let me choose the gravestone—
a line in Garamond from The Little Prince,
You will have the stars as no one else has them.

I wanted a pretty ending to that story.
But that isn’t life, right?
This is, this unholy, savage poem.
All my iguanas. For you.

*

The Last Woman

Years ago, a man smuggled the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre.
What did Vincenzo Peruggia think he could do with it? Hang it
on the wall of his Paris apartment? Women’s mysterious bodies
have always confused and fascinated men. Our miraculous woman
bodies that can make humans—like gods do. The way gods do.
Men have tried to imitate us. Remember Michelangelo dissecting
cadavers to study their design, so he could spend years chiseling
and polishing a slab of marble until a statue emerged from stone?
But women are much more than vessels, more than blue figures
trapped inside bell jars. We are more than breasts and legs dancing
on stages, in cages, bought and sold for men’s fathomless desire.
And when do we admit those cages were forged from men’s terror?
When the last woman on Earth weaponizes her own shattering?
When heaven drops the constellations, sugaring the land with stars?

*

Valentina Gnup’s poetry collection, Ruined Music, was published by Grayson Books in 2024. In 2023, she won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry and second place in the (NYC Yeats Society) Yeats Prize for poetry. In 2019, she won the Lascaux Prize in Poetry; in 2017, she won the Ekphrastic Challenge from Rattle; in 2015, she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award; and in 2011, she won the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including December, Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, and The New Guard, and she has two chapbooks published by Mille Grazie Press and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She lives in Mill Valley, California.