
Hard Feelings
feeling old when you open a folder of drafts
your hands and where to put them
your legs and how to lean
writing cover letters
and feeling like you’re a product review
thinking your voice sounds unsalted
when you hear it on a recording
feeling lonely inside a furniture store
grief
love
nostalgia
using people as templates
and making them live as characters
or contradictions
getting sad to cope with being bored
wishing you could kill a memory
like hunger
by feeding it
This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.
Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.
Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.
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