Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · Uncategorized Annexiety Claire Albrecht anxiety is the millennial condition, says a click-bait article I probably read somewhere; as for my own tangles, well, there are some parties you just shouldn’t go to. I’m one gnarled shoot of a gnarly nervous system, jacked up on caffeine-free cokes and celery and clenching my teeth at that cunt of a waiter, who probably had a panic attack five minutes ago. this basically makes us sisters. ‘you aren’t lazy, you’re just terrified’ is the latest feel-good production of the meme machine, but I can tell you right now, I’m definitively both – don’t pretend they’re mutually exclusive. I can drop a potato chip down the sleeve of my knitted jumper while I fear for all our futures, eye the vacuum off for months feeling petrified of filling one. but what’s a bit of dust floating around? at night I try to dream of Putin, just to see what he’d be like, shirtless, playing piano, I’m sprawled naked on his lounge stringing cheese between my fingers and feeling the soft- ness of what’s probably bear pelt tucked up under my arse. I tell him he can sanction and annex whatever he likes, if he promises not to meddle with my domestic affairs and we watch porn together, tapes of Trump pissing on women, he tells me his fantasies and I tell him mine, and when I try to fuck him from behind he gets antsy, grunts out a veto, something about NATO and the security of his borders and I get bored again, make a smoothie and sit cross-legged on my deck watching bats. things like, do you think Princess Diana liked pineapple on her pizza? not a metaphor, but I’d be interested either way. my earrings shake in the air like icicles in an earthquake. Image: Luis de Diego / flickr Read the rest of Overland 231 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Claire Albrecht Claire Albrecht is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle. Her current work investigates multimodal forms and the connections between poetry and photography in contemporary creative practice. Claire’s work appears in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland and Plumwood Mountain, among others. Her debut chapbook will be launched in October 2018. More by Claire Albrecht › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.