But not (excerpt)

Olivia Muenz

But it’s not like that. Let me try to explain. Let me give you a real out. Have you ever punctured something tiptop. Have you ever forgotten. Your shoes. Have you ever spun around real fast and become. A water balloon. Are you following all of this.

 

 

But I do apologize for the inconvenience. Did that sound sincere. Can you press your ear to my heart to make our own calendar. I am trying here. I am crafting something out of nothing. That is my specialty. Some make macaroons or millions of dollars. Not me.

 

But I am glued. To my handcar. My partner untied his shoes. He got out. I pump myself one-handed. I use all my weight. I am so tired. The whole world is a mirage. Where does this thing end.

 

But the bus is gushing us out one by one. Into Port Authority. Imagine being in the army. Imagine being deployed to Port Authority. Aren’t we all.

 

 

But I’m ugly. From the inside out. I suck. Your voice into a balloon and pop it. I lose. All my favorite bits. I retract. From the sun which is never a good sign. I don’t look for good signs. I capture. The flag.

 

But I can’t name the country. You ask. What it means to belong. I’m thinking about surrounding things. I wrap my Christmas. Tree with a. blanket. To keep us cozy. It looks so bad out there.

 

 

But I am in a Big Community. With myself. I am the Big Leader. I am the defect. I don’t want. To pay taxes. I am crocheting a big safety net. For all of us. I am working. Very hard.

 

But the phone calls are not going through. Hello. Operator please give me. A real out.

 

But I can’t find the end. Of the line. It grows faster. Than me I am playing. A big game. I eat all. The bits.

 

 

But I never run out of bits. Do you like my routine.

 

 

 

But only my temple. Is tender I am tough. Luck baby. I am down for the count. I am rained. Out.

 

But don’t let this get you. Down. Don’t go all soft. On me now. I am frozen. In time. I am a big memory box. I am all meat. I can eat you alive if you let me.

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Olivia Muenz is the author of poetry collection I Feel Fine (Switchback Books, 2023), winner of the 2022 Gatewood Prize, and chapbook Where Was I Again(Essay Press, 2022). She holds a BA from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she received the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. A ’22 Tin House Summer Workshop participant, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleaides, Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Music Column Editor for ANMLY. She lives in the Hudson Valley. Find her online at oliviamuenz.com.

Chicago, Illinois

"Shockingly original, haunting and strange, Olivia Muenz’s I Feel Fine fills me with a kind of longing I cannot properly name. At once novelistic and radically fragmented, achingly confessional and austerely technical, Muenz’s prose poems place me exactly where I want to be as a reader. I am at once moved by a voice and excited by a form, emotionally caught and cognitively awakened. With a syntax all their own, these poems make me sweat and make me marvel. Read them. Find poetry once again bright, new, and necessary."
—Julie Carr, 2022 Gatewood Prize judge

"I Feel Fine is a book of fine feelings, a record and enactment of feeling finally and finely. Chopped. Think of the 'I' as a blade, dicing experience? [...] Muenz’ work should be read within the fine tradition of modern and post-modern investigations of failure, while also being recognized as an important addition to the field of disability studies [...]. In her short, sometimes one-word sentences, urgently compelling in their staccato rhythm, Muenz makes it clear that language itself is a connective tissue disorder we all have—all we have—to communicate the fragility of presence, intimacy, attention, and life. This first full length collection by a gifted, brilliant, and brave poet offers readers a fine way to connect to our own embodiment, the body’s plentitudes and exhaustions, our swell and not so swell swellings and deflations: 'We are. Fine.' Muenz writes. Uh huh. I love. This. Book."
—Laura Mullen, author of Dark Archive

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