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Commodity Fetish

Gabby Bess

Issue 14

Poetry

Ann Cvetkovich says to feel your work doesn’t matter is to be dead inside

The specter of middle class values

A spiritual and somatic pain in my lower back

Sitting in a chair was a metaphor

Switching to a standing desk was desperate

Kill the old me

To focus on how to pay rent

By cultivating intimacy with the joke of meritocracy

I almost got arrested that once but stayed in bed

Smoked two cigarettes            panicked                      raged

Pushing that cop’s head into a toilet

A daydream for all the girls

Life is… knowing what it is like

Cops can’t get pussy

666 is chaotic 69

Jail should be in jail

Radical redistribution now!

I should probably drink more water

On the subway, now

Real sleeping through your stop hours

Awake on Adderall thinking about

The young Sri Lankan guy with a vague hedge fund-adjacent job

He said he doesn’t mind taking money from old, rich, white people

I laughed, refrained from saying

I didn’t mind taking money from him

Lacan says things do not work between man and woman

Marx says things do not work between boss and worker

You can feel it

Unfortunately, a feeling is not an end

I’ve been meditating on detaching

The self from labor my body provides

Leaning in to being a commodity fetish

I cry sometimes but my tears track different

My spring

Bounces back