This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo (Unsolicited Press 2023).
Don’t Forget to Take Your Heart Medicine
Everything is possible. I am capable. We can seek help from a god we don’t believe exists. I am only bad at things because I believe I am bad at them. Etc. etc. etc. Just one time I’d like to open a self-help book and see a picture of the author at their absolute worst, and have them say, “I know what you’re thinking. What a before picture! But this was this morning.” Or perhaps it could have a photograph of an old, lonely man covered in liver spots, looking out a window as a recreational activity even though there’s a brick wall blocking any view, and the place beside the window is the coldest spot in the house, and it is winter in Chicago, and the man is nursing a hemorrhoid, and by nursing I simply mean he has a donut cushion, not anything crazy, and there’s no pictures on the wall, unless you count the note beside the bathroom mirror that says “don’t forget to take your heart medicine,” and somehow you can tell all of these from the photograph, and the caption simply says, “This is your future even if you try.”
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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