This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo (Unsolicited Press 2023).
Fatigue is the Light Missing from a Broken Bulb
Fatigue can arrive from avoidance of fatigue, and the only way to cut open the loop is to sharpen a knife with your front teeth. My right front tooth is fake — a replacement after a car accident — and my left front tooth lacks grit. By my age, I should have a notable achievement: a pile of thank you notes, the ability to identify notes on a piano. Instead, I have seeds from my stepmother stuffed into white envelopes that should have been planted in November, and now the ground is dry as a nervous throat, and the sun as red as open poppies. I’m staying inside, anyway, because the lizards are in the trees puffing their throats into brilliant pink displays, and I’m not prepared for the beauty contest. At best, my mating display is my goosebumps raising the sheets at night. I can sew a button, and I can make shrimp etouffee, but I can’t figure out how to tell my partner when I want sex. On vacation, the green parrots with the white bare skin around their eyes blush at each other to initiate whatever parrot sex is, and they’re propped in the trees like heavy puppets. I admire it. How romantic, to have someone control your difficult body. I have overindulged myself and there is no solution. I have prayed under the weight of the moon when there is no book describing a god I can humor. I have found that fatigue is the light missing from a broken bulb, and it’s too dangerous to pick up glass.
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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