Tag: Mona Lisa

Two Poems by Valentina Gnup

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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.

Four Poems by Charles Rafferty

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Sand Dollar

Once, as a small child, while walking
with my uncle, who happens to now be dead,
I picked up the only sand dollar I’ve ever found
on the edge of New Haven Harbor.
There was a small piece missing
and I threw it back, certain I’d find one better.

* 

Mona Lisa

She spends her time behind
a bullet-proof window
but she can’t stop your looks
inside. I’d like to tell her
what I’m thinking over drinks
and something vegan —
the Florence that she knew is
not today’s. By now she must be
tired of all the ogling
and the custard pies. Still,
I’d like to kiss her in the ear
with my tourist Italian. I’d talk
about the moon, how we used
to walk where she once gazed,
how we’re not going back there
very soon. Everyone believes
she’s just an old-school NFT,
but she’ll outlast the glaciers
if some of us can swim.

*

American Prospects

The ocean only proves
the yacht is brother to the wreck.
It doesn’t matter what
you’ve planned — Malibu
is burning, and the stilts
of your beach house
aren’t high enough. No one
ever saw a star inside
the Stock Exchange. You need
to be outside for that.
The sky is a hat
that is never out of fashion
but often despised.
The ocean lies beneath it,
and the wrecks are farther still.

*

Letter to America

I cannot hear my own accent.
I cannot smell my own
bad breath. Familiarity
works against us,
and the world beyond
our headlights is mysterious
and dark. It won’t be easy.
In the olden days
they drew monsters
in the corners of their maps.
They felt safer on a ship
with the land in sight.
Listen, I know I sound funny
to you, and the distance
between us is startling
and vast, but a coat left out
in the car all night
eventually makes us warm.
We need only put it on.

*

Charles Rafferty has published poems in such places as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. His most recent collection is The Appendectomy Grin (BOA Editions). He is also the author of the story collection Somebody Who Knows Somebody and the novel Moscodelphia.