Joanie Cappetta

Not picking wildflowers. Nope to anything
as offered, to name and embalm what
feeling & fix it to the social corkboard
before certainness.

To leave a glass full & twirl a straw
is judgement. Leaving to do nothing
elsewhere.

Most sure about color & surface red
cardigan, royal hoodie, kelly beret, obstinate
feminine. Tonal is a kind of vulnerability
blue. Necklace under necklace, never only
one, many layered skirts.

She is yr inside self irreconcilable
Outfit a nuptial with day.

Incessant & hyperbolic sun sets sets sets sets
















If I keep this A here long enough I’ll rewrite its meaning—
Abomination, Abhorred, Aforenamed, Admonished,
Avowed (lover), Avowed (menace), Afterimage,
Adjective, Agitatress—as a tide retraces wetsand;

Breasts: bared and meaningless,
each costume tries to expose the part they obsess over,
it’s hard to find, it is summation and it is calculus
(the mathematical study of inconstancy)
(drawing the unknowable as repulsive straight lines)
projected on the sensitive & self-moving body
















Most arbitrary sign most meaningless most determined
most clung-to most violent most boring most considered
most punished most adored most reviled most caressed
most yearned-for most desired most triggering
most gripped most projected-on most symbolized
most covered most sold most discerned most clocked
most bought most traded most murdered most passing
most touched most repulsive most feared most quartered
most exposed most sought most revealed most clothed
















Vincent,

I’ll tell no soul, after so many tellings—all refusals. Yes it’s true one thing
refused: whichever is dearest to the critic. I too hated the town & the doctrine of
constancy. Distrust is an inside business, outside is a labyrinth in stones &
two-story tides. Do you share my impulse to pierce? Undone on the northern
slope—body writhes in passions that cannot be its own. I confess to longing to
break open. Would you have dyed your hair this year? Still, they remember most
about your shoes—you succeeded there you are dazzling beaded mules, you are
an upper arm shown a February afternoon, you are surface. The ocean knows
death and not sex. Eros just one half—I’ll permit myself a reference since u also
take pleasure in the archaic—and means nothing without Psyche’s lamp & loss.
You love beauty it is the oiled light from lamp. Your lovers only mean bc you’ll
leave them. You are new each day. You seem to prove my suspicions.

Rocco yearns to be the age you died, he imagines a paunch and a widows peak &
some gendered and pre-timed revelation. We only get to be free once we doubt
and doubt all the while, distrusting arrival until we arrive and give it all up.
We get one choice, to relinquish faith or inquisition.

Edna & Nancy, you, circling inhuman life—withered grass, the wasted growing
—watchful. This evening is lavender. How can anyone believe in a body. There
are tide-lines and rain. Our noses turn the same way—sentimental,
one of the most troubled. Your island was in 1790 marked on maritime charts
Cold Arse and I don’t know why I feel like u would think it right.

yrs,
















You are not my pearl
what are you?
visible?
of brokenness?

O, night bear me witness
I appear each day plausible. & yet

another ruin

I am partly to blame

Joanie Cappetta is a poet from California living in Western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in TILT, Antennae, the Brooklyn Rail, and Variable West, among others. They are thinking about the mud at low tide.