had logo

September 22, 2023

After Saying John Ashbery’s Poetry Is Like Getting Out of a Bath When It’s Still Warm, And My Workshop Instructor Laughs and Tells Us He’s Going to Tell His Friend I Said That, Repeating What I Said in a Lower Voice, Not Like “John Ashbery’s Poetry Is Like Getting Out of a Bath When It’s Still Warm” but More Like “John Ashbery’s poetry is like getting out of a bath when it’s still warm” Because People Don’t Normally Talk in Capitals, and Did Y’all Know I Visited the Capitol in Fifth Grade on a School Field Trip as a “Safety Patrol,” Back When I Didn’t Know the Responsibilities Behind Patrolling a School, Before An Intoxicated Man Intruded My High School Last Year and the School Cop, on Their First Day, Didn’t Know What to Do, so the Local Cops Shot the Intruder in the Same Building I Was in

Caitlin Villacrusis

I said that I’ll die before I ever finish “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and I think I’m six pages in. Does the comma go before or after the quotation marks? As seen on this screen — does anyone even remember As Seen On TV? — I didn’t try in case I’d be wrong. Don’t read too into it because I might have done it again. Sometimes, I read Frank O’Hara to understand John Ashbery because he’s, like, Ashbery-adjacent, and I can pretend I understand all the New York School poets.

I once bought a hair curler I saw on TV before watching the full commercial.

Caitlin Villacrusis is a Filipina-American poet based in Florida and a self-confessed pessimist. She is an Adroit Journal Poetry Mentee; a South Florida Youth Poet Ambassador; and a poetry editor at Hominum Journal, Hot Pot Magazine, and The Lunar Journal. Her work has been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and is published or forthcoming in The Lumiere Review, Bullshit Lit, The Dawn Review, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Sophon Lit, and more. She can be found obsessing over Victoria Chang on Instagram at @catrose2022 or Twitter at @caitlinvwrites, and her website is caitlinvillacrusis.carrd.co.