Poetry / Caitlin Thomson 

:: FeelingWise ™ (patent pending) ::

	
In the impossible future you can order emotions, 
via an app like Uber Eats but for your heart. 

Initially therapists panic and announce a boycott.
They remind everyone that they have terminal degrees

and are focused on the long road of living, not the 
emotions felt right now, but on crafting a better, future you. 

After their initial panic dies down, and the early studies roll in, 
the boycott is forgotten. Their number of patients is unimpacted. 

They might even occasionally indulge in a discreet visit 
from the delivery person themselves.

Like any food delivery service the results are a bit 
of a mixed bag. They almost always don’t get nuanced 

emotions right. When you order a post vacation high, 
you tend to be left feeling over caffeinated.  

An order for the giddiness of first love generally results 
in a sluggish feeling of contentment.

Sometimes the orders get mixed up and you are left 
feeling righteous anger, 

while your neighbor across the street experiences euphoria. 
The hangover from both is brutal, 

and you are left regretting 
what you did with all those eggs. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

All of these poems were writ­ten dur­ing Nation­al Poet­ry Month 2024. I have been writ­ing with the same group of poets now for over a decade. Some I only know via the pri­vate Blog­ger account we all share, and some I now know beyond that.

I think most of my poems this spring, and late­ly, strug­gle with this ten­sion between writ­ing pure­ly about ideas and writ­ing about actu­al lived expe­ri­ence. I per­son­al­ly enjoy writ­ing just about ideas, hypo­thet­i­cal poems if you will, but the poems I’ve always been able to pub­lish are poems about ideas through the lens of personhood.

For a long time I’ve kept my hypo­thet­i­cal poems apart from my per­son­al poems, sub­mit­ting them only in the con­text of each oth­er but final­ly this spring I’ve decid­ed to acknowl­edge that my thoughts and ideas are as much a part of me as my lived expe­ri­ence, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

Caitlin Thomson’s work has appeared in numer­ous antholo­gies and lit­er­ary jour­nals includ­ing: The Penn Review, The Adroit Jour­nal, The Fid­dle­head, Bar­row Street, Wrap­around South, and Radar Poet­ry. You can learn more about her writ­ing at www.caitlinthomson.com.