He'll offer to work overtime, get his hands dirty. He'll encourage all your bad ideas and say, I think you're onto something there. You're a real sharp knife.

At 5 pm, he smirks and points his chin to your other coworker: "He thinks he's a wiseguy, am I right?"  He walks out and goes home to pick lemons off his lemon tree, and says, when life gives you lemons, make shrimp francaise and drink a goddamn gin & tonic. Babe, he'll say to his wife, I got dinner tonight. I'm not a chump like all those other jerks you're used to. When he goes to work the next day, he winks and says, hope you had a blessed night like I did last night. Now it's time to get real, are we not God's gift to the world? Are we not human? Sometimes I don't think everyone is. Sometimes I think animals are more like humans than we are. He says this at the coffee maker to anyone who listens.

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Joanna 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), Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018), No(body) (Madhouse Press, 2019), and #Survivor (The Operating System, 2020). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing By Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.