VAGABOND CITY

MERYL D’SA interviews QIANQIAN

Tell us a little bit about yourself. My name is Qianqian Ye, but I go by Q. I was born in China and moved to the US in 2012. I went to architecture school and graduate school. After graduation I worked as an urban designer and public art consultant. I’ve been interested in art since […]

Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Issue 34

TO SEE AND BE SEEN by EMILY YIN

How easy it is to forget. You’re in the therapist’s waiting room, the hospital, the throes of a panic attack—and then you’re not. The nurse calls you in and the doctor sees you out; the darkness lifts and the sun begins to shine. These are just things that happen in passing, and reality has no […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

BUKOWSKI by CARA NEEL

In the winter with buried fists and breath held the bodies seek one another as the ice cracks open sidewalk and skull and the night stretches on past morning flesh shivers itself full. bones drawing close in the endless dark spaces warding off the chill and smoke drifts in and out of mouths a flush […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

I’M THINKING OF SHAPES by OPPONG CLIFFORD BENJAMIN

the shape of a sea is a shipcarrying bodies of frightened boysto where they can kiss boys without having to run into obituary posters on Lagos walls.the shape of hopeis a wooden cabin of the shipwith a windowthat reminds the boys of stories their lovers told themabout boys who wear their skin like it’s the […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

MIDSUMMER RESOLUTIONS by CARLY HO

we name every year the worst year. resolves into view an unhappy portrait: the youth in the chair still, unsmiling. brights of nursery greyed with time. was there ever happiness here? I just think of cicadas, in summer. The worst year, maybe, but: the only one they’ve got. and so they rise like lazarus into […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

EVERYTHING IS LOVE by DASCHIELLE LOUIS

you undo me::braids and sanity cord wrap around your fists and with the snap of your fingers i am good girl::grandma fills the basin with plants uprooted from the backyard, and although i itch, she reminds me that i am home::it seems easy for you to take the galaxy on my shoulders and make it […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

SAW-DUST BLENDED WITH SPIT by SAM FROST

isn’t glue / that doesn’t mean I didn’t sit in his car and wonder what it would be like to love calmly / man-made chemicals burn tongues / he leaned over and licked my lips / saliva can kill Sam Frost lives in Los Angeles and spends most of her time binge drinking green […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

BOMBSHELL PLANCHETTE/WHY CAN’T YOU MANAGE PLATINUM? by JESSIE JANESHEK

Makeup makes the lie and I’m afraid of your bleach my legs/the trees open. To motivate myself I dream Kim Novak white lights in the clouds the self-control suicide note. Memory is a construct and you make it complacent say I’ll fall off the high dive break my […]

Everything, Issue 34, Poetry

DEAR by JODY CHAN

you point your tongue at my flaws twelve glass girls slide off a shelf in my chest one for each year| I’ve committed your voice to my mind’s breath I think too much of myself & not enough of family you say loneliness is just a cold soup of wanting overturned onto the empty bed […]

Art, Everything, interview, Issue 33

MERYL D’SA interviews PRIDE NYASHA

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, my full name is Pride Nyasha Mapfumo. I am a Zimbabwean male artist and expressionist painter whose art mainly explores the dynamic nature of love and relationships. I studied art in high school and have continued as a self taught artist. I received a degree in Architecture […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

MAUSOLEUM by JUSTIN KARCHER

there’s this dream I’ve been having: a shiver of supermodels digging through my grandpa’s old stuff and telling me I’m not man enough when I wake up I put on some Kid Cudi and smoke the day away hey Mr. Rager they pump you full of parties then turn you into a constellation of mortgages, […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

MILLERSVILLE by GABRIELLE MARTIN

There comes a point where every small town in Pennsylvania looks the same but this one is mine: like dirt stains on the side of a row home on the end I am ubiquitous, familiar. My toes catch the dust falling through corners cracks, I am a heifer, staring wide-eyed at the sun (cows will […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

HONEY by YVES OLADE

i was born at dusk \ & some nights i still live there \ some nights \ it’s my body in the river \ & my hand reaching up to the moon \ keeping the sky together. \ but honey wants fragile, \ wants sweet. \ he wants something with its mouth wide open \ […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

FOUR LEGGED WORK by JENNY MACBAIN-STEPHENS

your forehead airplane angry baby naked gardener broken break up ceramics recycled trash fiction empty wine bottle the crane we didn’t know what it was allergic runny eyes questionable stain on a trench coat stolen gem ring at the gym salmonella dead deer by the side of the road that dream about that jerk boy […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

BREAKFAST POPSICLES by MAIA KACHAN

It’s monday and I eat two lemon popsicles as a start of the week meal replacement. I calculate the contents in my disordered (eating) brain and you tell me that popsicles aren’t food. When I call you mom and thank you for your concern we laugh in smiling eyes about the way we fucked the […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

SIX SLIPS OF PAPER CHANGING HANDS by MCKENNA JUDGE

number one soul-seller, preacher in the language of the flesh don’t take this wrong, but you’d look better with the lights off. eyes where my skin should be, rolling back to the bloodshot whites as you push your fingers into a bruise, or maybe it’s as simple as an excavation, the screaming of all the […]

Everything, Issue 33, Poetry

HONEYMOON RANCH by ZOE KURLAND

Here is what’s borrowed: We have all begun to look for something blue. The whole act is old — cowboy hat and borrowed suit, and just because your mother walks you down the aisle it doesn’t mean you’re A good guy. Old time chivalry with a hot tipped iron, welding the other with burn smack, […]

Everything

KATIE CLARK interviews KAYLEB CANDRILLI

Katie: I’ve read What Runs Over a few different ways now– straight through, with pauses, and at random, and it works every which way. The way you work with pace and temper creates this tension that holds a reader and is deeply unsettling throughout. The conversation between pieces, the movement through themes, the return to place and […]

Everything, Poetry, review, WHAT WE THINK ABOUT

Bethany Mary on “Crumb-sized” by Marlena Chertock

Marlena Chertock stunned us once before with her poems in “On that one-way trip to Mars,” and now she returns with another astronomical collection, “crumb-sized.” Familiar topics return with new flair and detail, teaching us more about blackbodies and exoplanets, and imparting more awareness on personal issues like dysplasia and queer life. One of her […]

Art, Everything, interview

MERYL D’SA interviews HOLLY SHARPE

Tell us a little bit about yourself. I am an artist and illustrator from Scotland, UK. I have lived in a few places, but have been based in Glasgow for the past few years where I have a lovely bright studio in the West End. What kind of work do you do? My work is […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

HOW YOU GUARD YOURSELF LIKE A SECRET by IFEANYI MICHAEL

Shadows belonging to the people that have died inside me form part of the weight I carry around. I carry ghosts of former friends in my pocket. Look closely, I burned my tongue yesterday after spelling rejection on the skins of those I once shared quiet nights with. The life I live is simple: Build […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

FUCKBOI PHRASES by MARISA ADAME

I remember used. I remember having thumbprints on my thighs // like grease-stains on a cracked screen. I remember being screen // door left unlocked in case he ever wanted to stop by // because he always wanted to come inside. I remember being cracked // dropped on linoleum floor along with a wine bottle & […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

THE NEEDLE TOLD ME TO BE QUIET by TEDDI HAYNES

Let me soil my fortune on crimson-licked love & your fox face. My prayer opens rehearsed bone, you incise through the marrow & drink it, let the keyhole ritual eat me whole. Not that I like it, I just want to remember what it’s like with your fingers slipping […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

MY NAME MEANS DOG by CALEB LOVELACE

a study: mid-bloom half-rot, my name has traveled so long to find me. a […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

ETHER by EMILY YIN

for my grandfather Rooftop shingles concatenate across the valley like fractal canopy, like RGB pixels blooming over the dusky night. In one rendering of my memory, Taipei is a city stalled on the threshold of morning, recursive function paused on the nth iteration of the scripting of this city that I love, suspended until the […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

PARALLELS/DEC by ABIGAIL MAY-DEVHANI

december 4, 2016: i am smoking, my lungs are leaking and my breaths are slowing and i may have taken pills but not without liquor / never with liquor. our breaths clash, like death’s cigarettes. it’s a smart kind-of self-harm. or at least that’s what i used to think. decay and destruction begin to rot […]

Everything, Issue 32, Poetry

HALF RIGHT by FREYJA JONES

When I was fourteen a blonde boy took me into a field and tried to fuck me in a hedge. It wasn’t a a suitable hedge; there were brambles everywhere. They poked at my skin, clawed at me like the boy who clawed his way up my legs. I lay there, semi-exposed in an English […]

Art, Everything, interview, Issue 31

VAGABOND CITY interviews ADIRA BENNETT

You work in so many different mediums. Do you have a favorite that you focus on more than others? Honestly, I can’t choose a favorite. I think different fragments — memories, emotions, ideas — demand different forms of representation. I enjoy allowing myself the freedom to play with as many different mediums as I […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

THE COLLAGIST by WALE AYINLA

I think of a number I subtract my siblings from it and divide the difference by father’s absence Convert this into an equation Three times the number is the same as when dust is added to it Take a face into your hands and add it to tomorrow growing in your marrows Approximate your heartbeat […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

BURN ONWARD by NATASHA BURGE

– and nights trying to reclaim the missing years in every swollen mouth and damp split of skin that stutters across my vision my soiled patch of south texas bed sheet my ugly sutured lip that still stings like the first time every time whenever I taste something oiled and sharp like a catalogue of […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

LOVE POEM 3 by HELGA FLOROS

i can’t write a love poem. awful way to start, like the machinations of our hearts beating in tandem. yours larger than your baby fist & infinitely stronger. i have always learned through abstaining. but i’m hungry. I wanna strip you down to your bones breakable and pale. I’m moonsick. you rise east. thump, thump, […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

DUDES by NATE VACCARO

At the Laundromat the cycles wash out Angel instincts from the yellowed armpits Of your t-shirts to exist as you were given Is the kind of dullness a body gets Submerged under ice for a thousand years Until dragged out, placed under operating Lights to only get a chance at ugliness Our hulks have been […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

ROOTS by MARIA DURAN

the family as an olive tree: something living, something ugly. an old gnarled thing with deep veins, honey-like sap. the family as something too fond of close embraces. the family as something too close to embrace. the family as something with ugly leaves and green-black things hanging from its boughs. not flowers. not berries. fruits, […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

LAUREL, YANNY AND THE VACUUM OF SPACE by VICTOR SHAW

you hear laurel I hear yanny you hear vinyl I hear caliper you hear sodom I hear I hate your best friend more than you hate my best friend you hear breeding ground I hear dumbell you hear sodden I hear danube you hear liminal I hear plug it you hear pencil I hear number hell you hear […]

Everything, Issue 31, Poetry

COUNTRY by NORA SELMANI

My ancestors never came close to the city. Their graves are on coastlines and in open fields, their last breaths were not in flats but in the mountains and out on the open sea. The first of my family to die here was my father, a man who longed for the country, where he […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

SELF PORTRAIT AS A LONE MIDNIGHT STAR OR A EULOGY FOR BESTIARY by NOME, EMEKA PATRICK

• There is uproar at the back// of this poem //which = i am a roaring chariot//= there is a tragedy// in this prologue // •• This story begins from a place of bloodlustgave my body to a butterfly or she gave// her body to me// an agreement sparkled with a matchstick// affection first prayed […]

Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Issue 30

CALENDARS by ELIZABETH THERIOT

Time and its contradictions. Wasted time. Its dreaded passing. How can I use or save it more efficiently? Time preservationist. The soft rotted time of forest floors. Photographs and boxes of mementos. Everything is time-sensitive. I am time sensitive. One night during the first few weeks of my current relationship our watches sat side by […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

I WAS NAMED AFTER SOMEONE ELSE by EMILY LAVRADOR

Emily Rose Lavrador December 24th We would wait to put up stockings Until all cake had been eaten Because it was her birthday first I would kneel on scraped knees And hear my cousin talk of color, strength, volume Peel up the skin of his wiser words and drape the film over the cantankerous crab […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

FROM TOP TO ENDING by MSW

bass boomin shhhhhrrrrrrttt soft tires on pavement chhht, a layered clap & snare from behind me breaths of a nigga behind me, getting closer exhaling to my right off footsteps in the grass & dirt, & one sharp scuff from me sidestepping a stroller steel lock & chain aluminum fencing soft screechin the pressure of […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

THE HOUSE WITH TWENTY THREE ROOMS by AMRITA CHAKRABORTY

you are always searching for yourself in every reflective surface. now turn and face it. the absence of what you haunted, late at night when you hoped he slept like a petal, a cast off shade moved from room to room. running your hand over every door. you want to be a blessing but you’ve […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

SUMMER RAINSTORM by ADIRA BENNETT

dedicated to S.B. and L.D. you are my favorite aching summer rainstorm: dewdrop fingers, sugarcane mouth, the valley flooding sweet and deep. you sing all the salt from the sea of my skin. us, our tangled driftwood bodies, merging river limbs flowing home, home, home. Adira Bennett (pseudonym of E.K.) is an artist, writer, and […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry

THE CHARGES AGAINST US by BETSY HOUSTEN

The box of dry Frosted Flakes at 4 AM is not the first indignity. All night we are chained together, a line of delinquent ducklings going in and out of cages, pressing fingers on the glass, reciting our numbers, staring at the camera. Guards bark: Face forward. Turn to the side. Don’t smile. Toward morning, someone calls my […]

Everything, Issue 30, Poetry, Prose

I TRAPPED YOU IN A VINCE GUARALDI TRIO SONG by SPENCER SILVERTHORNE

I dusted my father’s old Bose CD-player. It was once white but now it has yellowed like tintype. Do you remember seeing ads for these blocks on the back of PARADE magazines that came with the Sunday paper? No? I guess your family only subscribed to commercial-free periodicals and only listened to jazz. You did […]

Art, Everything, Issue 29

VAGABOND CITY interviews ALYSSA MOORE

Where are you from? Columbus, OH What are your hobbies? I’m usually creating something, photography, dance, and I’m always up for trying something new! What kind of dance have you done? I did Jazz and lyrical in high school and then I choreographed in an organization called Ayo at Cedarville University. When did you start […]

Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Issue 29

THE GUIDE TO BEING MEXICAN-AMERICAN FOR DUMMIES by KRYSTAL NAVARRO

i. your american mother will unintentionally white-wash you. when orientation for kindergarten begins, her first instinct will be to put a little ‘x’ in the box marked ‘white’ for your ethnicity because her translucent skin burns in the sun, and she forgets that yours tans. when your father weaves stories of el chupcacabra and la […]

Everything, Issue 29, Poetry

THE LEVITY OF TRUTH by GRACE LAU

There really is no good time to tell your mother you’ve never liked boys. Closets do not relinquish their grips easily but I have always instinctively hated dresses. So when my mother asked me about boyfriends again as we wrenched the tails from luscious prawns and cracked their shells with our teeth, I offered the […]

Everything, Issue 29, Poetry

EMILY AS SHE SPENT THE DAY NOT LOOKING AT ME by DARREN C. DEMAREE

I am thawed. Deep in winter, I am warm for Emily & she knows that. The sky stays stark & she knows that as well. I am thawed & I still invite her to walk across me. She prefers the shore most days. I can only be the lake & most of my invitations aren’t […]

Everything, Issue 29, Poetry

CADENCE by DANIELLE ELEANOR

your name tastes like the ocean in my mouth the highest arch of green smoothed by sun then white foam fizzing out snapping bubbles kiss my ankles you go on for miles if I think about you and nothing else I can taste you whenever I want my lungs s […]

Everything, Issue 29, Poetry

I’M PAINTING A HATRED OF YOU by ARIELLE TIPA

my twin, my twitch – prettily you demonstrate your lazy eye the rococo latticework of your scapula – you are most beautiful in braille my hammock, my summer my opium glitch, my tambourine din i’ve been cat-tongued in places you have never lived in tantrums you have never nursed you are killing me to death […]

Everything, Issue 29, Poetry

LEAVING THE LIGHTS ON by LIZ BRUNO

Sometimes I suspect I am nothing but a hotel. My mother stays in my lips. My father sleeps in my eyes. My last lover stumbles around With my flowery bathrobe flung on. Yes, there are guests lurking In every floor of this high rise, Even the uninvited ones. My ex-husband twists around my intestines. His […]