Joanna Fuhrman

These Six Emojis Explain Your Life Right Now

I know how to wrap myself in other people’s mishigas. All morning I read about the woman from Louisiana who can’t stop her son from hiding under the bed, a man in South Korea learning to fish in a hotel bathtub, a child across town who swallowed a whole marshmallow shaped like the Guggenheim. I take screenshots of these strangers’ problems and blend them into a banana-kale smoothie, drink it from a wine glass with my naked ass deeply sunk in a silk pillow. Afterwards, my body is a pink cloud with winged sneakers. I hover above the data, rain down gossip on other people’s pain. This is a kind of freedom, but also – what? A kind of tragic happiness like that cowboy who thinks he can lasso transcendence and tie it to his belt buckle. Or like that photo of the lake on fire your student posted as their Grindr pic, or at least claimed he did. Like everything else, you’ll never actually know.

The Warriors

I am rewriting the script to The Warriors. 

In this version, our gang travels subterranean media drinking radioactive lite beer –  or is it pre-verbal memories. 

When they arrive at the boardwalk, the surveillance cameras flicker. Strangers battle each other with feathers or tweets.

After the hero takes off his clothes, he keeps removing parts of himself until all that’s left is a heart-shaped gap where his brain used to be.

In the morning, the abandoned shopping mall is transformed into a hotdog stand selling empty buns.

The zero at the heart of the narrative opens its mouth and swallows the plot. Two oceans become one. Five oceans become 59
thousand bodies of water. 

The wandering men become wandering mouths, then clicking fingers pretending to be free.

The computer transcribes the motorcycle’s dreams and spits them out as broken glass, then data.

My childhood is dismantled and repacked as snacks.

What the audience remembers of the fight is just a series of dots and dashes. 

What the fist remembers is the moment before the smack, that golden pocket of quiet. 

What I remember of my script drips from the sky onto the glass keyboard.

What the crowd remembers is the journey below, what it’s like to travel as a group –  to see all the members as one body, then to watch it break apart.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2016), and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She is a former poetry editor for Ping Pong and Boog City and served as the Monday-night coordinator for the poetry readings at The Poetry Project from 2001 to 2003 and the Wednesday night coordinator from 2010 to 2011. She currently teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University and coordinates the Introduction to Creative Writing Classes and the faculty and alumni readings. She's currently working on a book of prose poetry about the internet called Data Mind.