This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo (Unsolicited Press 2023).
The Loneliest Blue is the Reflection of the Sky
God is the expectations of our ancestors, and I come from a family with low expectations. Upstairs, the carpet is half-removed and folded over, and my blood from two decades ago is a dry splash in the corner. My father slowly paces in the kitchen. He picks up crumbs I can’t see and rants about mice. I ask him if his eyes are blue or green, and he says, “I don’t pay attention to that shit.” I remember putting pink barrettes in his curly mullet as a child. I probably knew his irises then, in the way I know the sunlight while actively avoiding looking at the sun. The walls of his house are quiet. I chew my water. I eat with the mouth of an unanswered question. I want to tell him I once thought I’d catch bubbles of silence in my mouth until life ended. That I was once washed with grief until I was clean as used soap. He tells me to I need to go to church. But my friend and I both read the Bible and The God Delusion together, and we came out dumber with each book. Now I only read poetry, and who knows how that is affecting my brain. But more importantly, who knows the burning last spatter of feces from birds that come barreling out of the sky when a father doesn’t respond to “I love you”? I take a bath and it feels like cold wind. I listen to the clouds, and the edges crisp like the ends of cigarettes. I have found the edges of my father’s voice. They hang like frayed strings longing for ties. I’ve almost found a way to harness the stringy clouds. I’ve almost found a way to strangle the sky.
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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