3 poems in 2 places

What it says in the title! I have 3 new poems out via fifth wheel press and Underblong. They are neat.

I love fifth wheel press. They put out anthologies, guest-edited issues, and whole-ass books. For the breadth of stuff they do, they also have one of the clearest points of view of anywhere currently publishing poetry.

So when I saw their next anthology would be brainrot-themed, I was like, ah! Time for my bullshit!

I have 2 poems in brainrot:

We know I have a toxic situationship with LinkedIn. Over the past decade, LinkedIn has revealed unto me some of the most inhuman and bizarre rhetorical positionings I’ve ever witnessed. Owned by noted IDF sucker-offer Microsoft, LinkedIn continues to wow me on the daily.

My favorite genre of LinkedIn post is “deeply unhappy person selling lifestyle change.” This genre predates LinkedIn, but the platform adds a certain recursiveness and #hustlecore edge I find compelling. Here is a person who broke out of the matrix and came back to save you too, via a downloadable toolkit and questionable PayPal transaction.

LinkedIn Post #4 is a poem about that!

Yes, that’s the title. tl;dr: an AI “art”/COVID realism/land back screed.

View it in landscape or desktop mode or else it won’t make sense. I almost did not submit this, because some of these themes are so saturated right now. But I guess that’s kind of the point.

Despite my very googleable history of NSFW and NSFW-adjacent writing, I think if I ever get fired for a poem, it’ll be for this one. Watch this space!

My other new poem is in Underblong. It’s called “Self Portrait as Anne Geddes Calendar,” and it is exactly what it sounds like.

I know Anne Geddes’s work mostly through wall calendars I did not buy. Her manipulated-baby photos were inescapable growing up, usually in the form of stationery and coffee table books. They unsettle me.

But I loved me a wall calendar as a kid. Especially the back of one, where you could see the thumbnails of each page like a little preview for your year. Sometimes I would cut up this part to make a second, smaller calendar.

I wrote this poem at the end of 2024, thinking about what I was signing up for in the coming year, both directly and indirectly. By choosing the extent to which I engage with loved ones’ antivax conspiracy theories, for example. Or giving companies and my government more money to kill people and turn water brown. The absurdity of imperial power and hyper-individualism and rot. Seeing that stretch out, holding it in your sweaty paw.

Underblong was one of the first truly internetty publications I ever came across. It published things I couldn’t fathom being bound and ISBN’d, but which didn’t feel like a print zine, either. Chen Chen and Sam Herschel Wein are very cool. I am happy this poem found a home in Underblong. The whole issue is good.

Also, did we know this is what Anne Geddes looks like?

I’m almost done with my first Real Big Notepad (RBN), the virtues of which I preemptively extolled here. Over a year later, I can now confirm that the RBN is that bitch and did change it all, long term.

I love how iterative the RBN lets me be. I like doing more early revisions by hand before letting Daddy Google Drive see them. The slowness and wide spaces lead to more surprising choices, I think. I like how there’s ample room to jot down phrases I fixate on throughout the day. And I love that it is its own desk.

One caveat is that I used the RBN a bit differently at the beginning of this journey:

Compared to now:

I still use tiny Field Notes notebooks for daily lists and factual brain dumps, so the RBN is more just writing-writing now. That little bit of separation helps keep things organized without feeling restrictive.

The RBN is a bit unwieldy, due to its bigness. Flipping back and forth between pages isn’t bad, but fully opening and closing it is annoying. I work around this by leaving it open on the bed all day. The drawback here is that my unbaked drafts are always just sitting there pussy-out for the world to see. But I got over it, and my boyfriend swears he doesn’t look, so whatever.

I highly recommend incorporating an RBN into your creative practice. It is the closest I’ve felt to writing on the table at one of those Italian restaurants where you can write on the table.