Two poems by Olivia G. Rose

My lover is a television

My lover is a television playing fuzz on a loop. I am a remote. We don’t know if I am a broken remote or

if he is a broken television. We don’t know if my batteries are dead or misplaced or alive. We don’t know

if he is a working television with a broken satellite. We aren’t too sure how any of it works, the Apple TV

or the wavering connection. And maybe the WiFi is out as it usually is. Because my lover is television

fuzz, when he leaves me, he tells me he can never be with a remote again, but, weeks later, I see my lover

has found a new remote. You wouldn’t know she is any different than me, except the battery plate is

missing, so we all know she is missing her power. When I saw her naked cavern on Instagram, I put my

finger to the screen, trying to finger the open space. Then I cried and wrote a poem about an Orca who

fell in love with a shark.

Once there was an orca

Once there was an orca who fell in love with a shark. You might know that orcas are predators of great

whites. The phrase “sexual prowess” comes to mind. When the orca fell in love with the great white

shark, she removed his organs with surgical precision. (Seriously. You can Google it.) That way she had a

great white carcass of the great white shark that she loved. Her strange babies used it as a playhouse. One

time, they huddled inside and had a lemonade stand. The neighbors were too scared to come close to the

carcass, so they didn’t make any sales. But they had a big plastic sign with blood red ink that read DAD.

Olivia G. Rose is a writer from San Jose. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University, where she won the Alan Soldofsky Award for Outstanding MFA Thesis and served as Reed Magazine's Senior Poetry Editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Blood+Honey, Qu, PHIL LIT Journal, Cola, Red Coyote, Long River Review, and elsewhere.