This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo (Unsolicited Press 2023).
The New Yorker
I submitted some of my poems to The New Yorker. I must like pain. When I was a child, I would thread needles through tissue-thin layers of my skin and marvel at my minor injuries, my new little baggies of flesh that hung from my fingertips. Not much has changed, I see, as I stare at my rejection letters with a similar gross curiosity. I’m not thinking about it too-too much, I tell myself. I’m rubbing my fingers together over where they were once scarred from sewing needles that ate my body like metal termites. I suppose my skin went “back to normal,” but I have no clear memory of what that normal was and who knows if normal is ever inherently good anyway. I’m tired of trying to figure things like that out. We all once had fun with philosophy and then it cracked and shriveled, like a house plant without a window. I own a book on walking through these kinds of forests that don’t have paths. Forests as dark as the insides of our organs. It has something to do with a metaphorical trailblazing and I’m over it. I am struggling to turn its pages with my fingers; they are tapping on the armrest. I am impatiently waiting to receive my rejection from the New Yorker.
Lisa Mottolo is a neurodivergent poet living in Austin, TX. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Monetize Despair (Unsolicited Press, 2023) and she is the Founding Editor at Lit Fox Books. Lisa has attended writing programs at UC Berkeley and Kenyon College, and her work has appeared in Penn Review, The Laurel Review, Diagram, Santa Clara Review, and others. You can find her doing typical poet things like admiring birds, romanticizing the dark, and being overstimulated at AWP.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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