If you’re reading this email from this mostly inactive substack, you are officially a dear friend and you can stay in my San Francisco apartment any time you wish.
I might not be joking! Especially if you buy my chapbook titled Venmo Poems whose recent release is why I’m back on here. It’s like 40 poems across 32 pages. Some of them are longer, most of them are short. At some point Venmo put a reasonable (280) word cap on the transaction note, so they had to be short thereafter. Here’s the blurb:
About 7 years ago I started writing poems to my friends in Venmo transactions. They're unified by my obsessions with history, politics, and pop music; hatred of police, prisons, and work; the love of my friends, comrades, and everyone fighting back. The poems definitely say "I'm girlypilled!" They definitely do NOT say, "Learn to code." Anyway, rent was due and you paid, or I paid, or you bought me a beer, or I bought you a beer.
The poems try to metabolize this awful social condition, the one we share, where things must be paid for.
Here’s what the cover looks like, which was designed by my talented friend P. Kinaga:
And here are some poems from within:
MAY 15
for the time you accidentally
majored in ManEcon
for the time I bought
a Rollie
which was fucked up,
sorry.
for the time you forgave you
and indecent exposure exchange-value
I said,
big who gives a fuck
stars are made up of
bodies so they
must be
trafficked too.
You kissed me on the tube
I did too
That one was asking my roommates to pay me back after paying the PG&E bill! It remains to be known whether getting this kind of thing makes paying bills less miserable. We return to the age-old question, of whether poetry has a liberatory function or if it simply lubricates one’s passage through daily social relations. One thing we hopefully can all agree upon: present social relations are not hot. Paying bills is not hot.
JUNE 7
ground, figure
go figure
figure, ground
fish are round
still, they
maintain
their
girlish figure
MARCH 3
Everything was over
I kept arriving to things when they
were already over and yet
I felt there was something new
to eat
lean over
maybe I’ll be a mange-fange
which means mud-eater
and I’m so sick of Winter
there is not so much earth
left.
Instead
I’ll gain a taste for lead
If this seems like your kind of thing and you want to read more, you can reach out to me about buying a copy. P.S. my name’s Joni now 👋
wow we these are soo good! i would
love to venmo you 12 dollars for them