Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!

Llama llama red pajama! We took the poetry team that we coach to the llama farm as part of a writing retreat, and we got to hold this little baby llama that was only a few days old!

WHAT’S NEW

30 POEMS IN 30 DAYS

Last chance to sign up before this course starts on April 1st! I had a ton of fun creating the prompts for this year, and I’m looking forward to reading everyone’s poems!

https://writers.com/course/30-poems-in-30-days

BUTTON POETRY LIVESTREAM

Eric Sirota and I will be playing poetry tag and chatting about my new book! Head on over to the Button Poetry Facebook on April 14th at 2 pm CST to hear some new poems, probably hear me accidentally swear a bunch when I’m trying not to, and overall have a fun conversation!

https://www.facebook.com/ButtonPoetry

DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE BAD

Speaking of that book, Don’t Be Afraid to Be Bad is open for pre-orders! This book includes a poem from almost every Button Poetry author reprinted, followed by a prompt inspired by that poem (yes, that means I’ve read the entire Button catalog). It would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it, and I hope you have a lot of fun writing alongside it!

https://buttonpoetry.com/product/dont-be-afraid-to-be-bad-a-big-book-of-button-poetry-writing-prompts/

MIDWEST POETRY MASH-UP

Tickets are officially on sale for my favorite thing of the year! Until April 19th, you can get a single bout ticket for $8, finals for $15, or a whole festival pass for only $25 (that’s FIVE shows). If you’re in Minnesota, I really hope to see you there! (You’ll see some of the best slam poetry of your life, plus if you want to, you can be a judge!)

https://midwestpoetrymashu.wixsite.com/midwestpoetrymashup

POETRY AGAINST ICE

As always, Kyle Tran Myhre is doing cool work, and I got to be a part of that cool work once again! You can check out the full video, which includes poems, conversation, and resources here: https://guante.info/2026/02/13/iceout/

PEN AMERICA PERFORMANCE OF 10,000 LAKES

If you want to check out a performance I did for PEN America of my poem 10,000 Lakes, you can check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/4276913732622695

PROMPT

Here’s another prompt from my new book! This time, from the back section of bonus prompts. (Couldn’t we all use a little joy right now?)

PETE

The temperature here has been oscillating wildly— Pete is deeply happy on the days it’s nice enough to go out on the porch, and very confused at our cruelty when he cannot.

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER

Today’s poem and today’s thought corner are melded into one— I present to you something that is not quite an essay and not quite a poem. As a poet, it’s my prerogative to make entirely too much out of any situation, but I certainly didn’t think I’d come out of a Boys Like Girls 20th anniversary concert with an essay worth of stuff— I suppose life will surprise you.

THE LEAD SINGER OF BOYS LIKE GIRLS ADMIRES MY RATTAIL AND ASKS ME IF I THINK HE COULD PULL ONE OFF

And of course, I say yes, because he absolutely could. He says, I'm gonna do it. Next year you'll see me with a rattail and it will be because of you. I say yeah, and your rattail will be about six inches long. He laughs and asks if he should get extensions. We are approaching the end of how long two strangers can admire one another's hair, but throughout the show, I think about it. When he makes eye contact with me while he sings, I picture him this time next year, looking less like himself and more like me.

I grew up in this scene, and, primarily, the hardcore scene adjacent to it. (At the time, I was such a stickler for correct genres, but here, I’ll say pop punk or emo or scene or post hardcore, or whatever. What I mean is I was there for all of it, and it all happened at kind of the same time, at least the way I experienced it, so it’s part of my memory this way). I loved so many boys with eyeliner and tight jeans who were happiest when hitting each other. These boys would teach me how to scream, and we would practice as we flew down the highway in cars whose brakes hadn't been changed in ten years. I wanted nothing more than to unhinge my jaw and have the same noise they made come out of me. I was feral for it, for the scratch in my throat, for the rough cigarette-sound of my voice after. At concerts, I would trail after these boys, or stand in front of them while they curled an arm around me and protected me from getting kicked in the head by crowd surfers. Once, a boy I went to school with punched a guy who had elbowed me too hard in the pit, which was, of course, its own kind of chivalry. (We made out later in the basement). But what I truly wanted was to be able to hit back, to bleed and to heal and to bleed again, to wear all of the badges that good-natured violence could earn.

More than fifteen years later, the lead singer of Boys Like Girls says he will grow a rattail like mine, and it is the first time that instead of me wanting to be like one of these boys, one of these boys wanted to be like me.

And yes, sure, the lead singer of Boys Like Girls is officially 40 years old so probably not a boy, but a man. But this man is standing next to me, his hands gentle through my hair as he examines the architecture of my haircut. He asks before he touches me and has a kind word for every undercut, every soft curl, a stunning noise for the length of my braid. (Over 2 feet long, in case you are wondering. And yes, I am deeply vain about it.)

I started growing out my rattail the same year The Great Escape came out. My ex boyfriend used to threaten to cut it off in my sleep. I had a rattail back when it was a thing that mostly rednecks did, because I actually, like, was a redneck. (A goth redneck, but still. And goth rednecks are more common than you’d think). I grew up on a dirt road but in a town with an emo scene of fifteen to thirty dudes and three to five really cool girls. Most people don’t think about country kids during the rise of emo and pop punk and hardcore, but we drove to the cities monthly for concerts at Station Four, splitting the gas money down to the dollar, and cooling off afterwards with a giant 99 cent slushie from Super America. We even had a venue of our own, a little freestanding building in someone’s yard in Milaca called The Choir House (it used to be a choir house, and if I remember correctly, still had the risers built into the floor), where we would take old mattresses and run walls of death at each other with the mattresses like giant, stinky shields. For several years, I was part of a post hardcore band that practiced in an old shipping container. After I broke up with my boyfriend (the lead vocalist), it will come as no surprise that I was no longer welcome in the band. A year or so later, they put out an actually good EP with someone who was actually pretty famous, and on that album, there’s a very decently-mixed hate song about me.

I loved the music, but I don’t think the music ever loved me back. I talk often about what the emo culture of the early/mid 2000s did for us, how helpful it was in terms of opening up conversations about mental health, letting men explore a certain kind of femininity (eyeliner, nailpolish, tight jeans) in a society that was deeply binary and femmephobic. I genuinely think it was a very important first step in a lot of peoples’ journeys to queerness, and several of us in that smalltown scene have since come out as trans. It was not perfect, but it was more than what mainstream culture offered to us, and it helped to keep me alive during a very difficult time of my life. All of that being said, it was a culture that could not rise above certain things, and both the lyrics and the culture were deeply engrained with misogyny and homophobia. As a “girl” in that scene, I absolutely felt like a second-class citizen, like a pet or a prize, often being asked to dance to songs with lyrics like “Get down on your knees, bitch,” written by men who were serial rapists. And don’t even get me started on the lack of women on stage-- at Warped Tour, I can only ever remember seeing two women-fronted bands (shoutout Paramore and iwrestledabearonce) the entire several years that I attended. Women were so underrepresented and the misogynistic culture was so engrained, that I actually internalized it and said for years that I simply “didn’t like” women vocalists. (How can you “not like” an entire gender of vocalists? I’ve since done many years of work on this to unlearn it.)

All of this to say, none of those boys ever wanted to be like me.

Sure, they wanted to be next to me, or inside me. They wanted what I could do for them. God, those boys were so selfish and stubborn. And beautiful--they were so beautiful. They were able to dip their toes into femininity without ever getting their feet wet, while I stood next to them in my full face of makeup and drowned. And god, what I wouldn't give to have been able to be a boy like that. Tight jeaned, nail polish making the truckers look at me sideways. What I didn't do back then to unzip a guy like that. What I still might do, if I'm being honest.

But this wasn't supposed to be a story about how jealous I was of their beauty. It was supposed to be a story about my own. About an old band, who I used to listen to sometimes at a time in my life where I didn't love myself very much at all, and that lead singer fifteen years later spending a few genuine moments to compliment my hair. About finally being able to offer something to manhood instead of it only ever offering something to me.

And if he does it (like he said four times he was gonna do it), I need you to mark your calendar for a year from now. And in a year, I need you to look at the back of the lead singer of Boys Like Girls’ head. And if you see a rattail, however short or however long, know it is the legacy of a former-emo-kid-current-non-binary-badass, and know that finally, in some small way, this world belongs to us too.

Love,

Ollie

Bonus!

My partner got me tickets to see Mae Martin for my birthday, and pictured here you can see me putting entirely too many questions into the question bucket in an attempt to stack the odds in my favor. Unfortunately, Mae did not end up randomly choosing any of my questions, which was a real shame because they included such gems as “Would you rather bang Paul Bunyan or Babe the Big Blue Ox?” and “Don’t you think Minnesotan accents are, like, at least a little hot?”

OLLIE SCHMINKEY

It's Almost National Poetry Month!