This one is based off of “hurricane lazarus”, one of my favorites from our new zine.
In other news, I couldn’t remember the name of my world history teacher and it bothered me so bad that I looked through emails for hours from 10+ years ago and came up with nothing but exhaustion, so I think it’s sleep time. Good afternoon and goodnight.
-Allēna
Fuck it. Might as well go all in.
Here are a few poems I wrote for an antifascist literature jam.
The full zine is here if you want to read it. I’m gonna speak freely while there’s still some semblance of a First Amendment left.
-Allēna
I’m slowly getting to work on my next poetry zine. It’s shaping up to be a larger one, somewhere along the size and scale of Field Notes From a Colder Time or Easy to Hate Like Everything You Love.
I don’t have a working title yet and frankly I don’t want to rush one or reveal it until it feels right. All I know right now is that I’ve been working through and with a lot of themes regarding mental health and cyclical patterns since my therapy session a few days ago and an interesting few poetry workshop sessions. So expect a lot of new work to do with circles and cycles! Maybe ellipses, too…hmm…
I do love a good ellipse.
There might be a poem in there, too. I really am quite eccentric (ha!)
I have some phone calls to make and I didn’t get much sleep last night since I was up until almost dawn watching Netflix – and not working – tragically, but I haven’t had access to my shows for weeks, so a good binge was in order.
More tomorrow. I’ve gotta run before my energy runs out and I lost my nerve.
-Allēna
This post was first published on my Substack.
Hello, everyone. I want to preface this by saying that I have absolutely no fucking clue where this is going. I started a draft of this post in the Substack app, but the links were being odd, so I am starting over from the web editor and seeing where the night takes me.
Before I began that draft, I reread the zine I dropped in June, easy to hate like everything you love, and started listening to the companion playlist I made, called I think you made me hate this city, and started thinking about why I wrote the damn thing at all.
For starters, I was really, really fucking pissed off at the state of the world, and still am. I was at the tail end of a five year and some long divorce process that I address in the poem “the jailer”, and I was stuck in a deep flow state, often in the wee hours of the morning, screaming my thoughts out on paper, kinda like I’m doing now.
I felt like everything in my life was in shambles, and, desperate to regain some internal sense of control, I wrote like my life depended on it. I’ve written my way out of holes like that for years.
I’m also often up for most of the night most nights doing what the fuck ever, whether I’m writing rambles like this, crafting zines like easy to hate, catching up on messages, watching shows, or reading fluffy fanfics. It feels like a fuckload is expected of me during the day, I go nonstop, and the wee hours of the morning is the only time I get to myself to just…be and have time to do whatever I want and actually feel like I have time to be a functional person. Nobody needs me at 2:27 AM (the time I’m writing this), and if they do need me, I know it’s truly dire. In a time when I still feel like I have very little agency over my life, this is heaven.
I think I’m gonna leave y’all with a few lines from “20 January 2025”, one of my favorite poems from easy to hate:
"I hail from the hellfire that raised me
and the shadows that granted me solace
Black as the Pit from pole to pole
And I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul."
Go forth and carve some time out to relax today. It’s rebellion.
-Allēna
-Allēna
