New poem in In The Mood 👜

FATHER 🙏 💕 SON 🧑 AND HOUSE 💄👛 OF GUCCI 🛵✨

In The Mood has once again come in clutch with a home for some of my least marketable work, and for that I thank them. Their new issue is inspired by their (also very good) movie recommendation generator, so it’s organized by ~mood~.

This presented the perfect opportunity to write a poem about the time I watched House of Gucci iteratively across 9 people’s seat-back monitors during a short flight. The mood I picked for it was “obsessive,” given the arc of the film and the method in which I watched it.

Me being furtive in my aisle seat

I also wanted to explore the concept of obsession without the whole disorder part attached to it. These days, my OCD typically surfaces only in a select few contexts, one of which ironically is airplanes. But lurking among a chorus of headrests offers a joyfully low-stakes obsessive experience that isn’t anything like counting the syllables of every in-flight announcement. Watching all the tiny screens start the same movie at different times and distances was a revelation. I highly recommend this method.

Times when I’ve been non-OCDly obsessed with something have all been exercises in expansion: wanting to soak up information, see something from every vantage point. And if that leads to some light parasocial relationships with randoms on a domestic flight? Even better. I tried to capture that here, albeit against the backdrop of some less-healthy instances of obsession from our fashionable mom and dad.

I’ve been watching Lost for the first time lately. If I were in a plane crash and stuck on an island, I think I’d first seek out the people who had been watching the same movie as me when it all went down. Please DM me your Lost thoughts, keeping in mind I am only on season 2.

Other people’s poems you should read

• BITTER ENGLISH by Ahmad Almallah

• We Teach Life, Sir by Rafeef Ziadah

• there is a pinky finger in my mouth by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi