From Lizzie Ferguson's Chapbook, I Never Leave Lost Teeth Under My Pillow, Available From Bottlecap Press!

“I don’t know what my goals are, no. Thanks for asking.”

When someone you love offers a bid for connection, you say yes every time. When someone sends you an article, a video, a funny post, it’s a bid for connection. They are trying to connect with you. When someone shares details about their day, their life, their thoughts, or their feelings with you, that is a bid for connection. They want to connect with you on a deeper level. They are trying to pull you into their world. If you love them, you say yes every time. Yes, even if the article they send is not particularly interesting to you. Yes, even if it means listening to them ramble about a game you don’t care about and think is stupid. Yes yes yes. And let’s hope they always say yes to your bids, too.

im a published poet

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

via @swatercolor [insta]

reminder

made a poem i wrote into a comic. anyone else angry that you have to yearn

did you guys see the poem from a couple of days ago in poetry dot org’s daily poem it was so good and a treat to read