Lip Gloss Assault

Vanesa Arostegui likes to blend her real-life experience with fiction to write poetry and sci-fi surrealism. She has a BA in English and a BA in Psychology and is completing her MS in Mental Health Counseling. She works primarily with homeless populations and wants to encourage her readers to donate bottled water, waterproof shoe spray, and pet food to their local homeless shelters. Vanesa believes the best way to write a poem is to read it to all the stray cats who visit her office.

Previously, her work has shown up in The 2020 Manastash Literary Journal, titled “Scorpio Coloring Book” and “mommy’s alcoholic,” and in  the Spring 2022 edition of The Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, titled “Three-Fourths Dead.” Most recently she won third place in the 2023 YCP Twenty-Eighth Contest Chapbook for her five poems, “A Playground Monitor Cannot Die,” “Winning the Narrative Like I Win in Therapy,” “My Parents Won’t Show Me My Birth Certificate,” “How Spaniards Say ‘I Love You,’” and “You Cannot Have Perfection and Company.”

Vanesa shares her more off-the cuff poetry on her TikTok account @clusterbwriters. She loves sharing it with strangers and has mixed feelings when people from her personal life find it, because it never stops feeling like a middle school crush opening her diary.