meteor showers are akin to childbirth disasters waiting to happen a blinking vessel a product of snowflakes splitting blood interpreted as fingerpaint kissing the unturned cheek
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THE COMING AND GOING OF STRANGERS by B. BASSETT
hoping to be more intimate with myself & otherpeople open|shut muted exchanges
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MOOD: ANXIOUS by DANIELLE CORCIONE
mood: anxious mood: waiting for your friend at the bus station mood: wandering aimlessly while eating a Cliff bar mood: “are you looking for Transit or Rail?” mood: soldiers in camouflage hovering mood: that aren’t traveling mood: getting too hot from wearing a jacket you don’t want to take off and lose mood: afraid of […]
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BLACK HOODIE, WOLFBOY, HEARTACHE by LOGAN FEBRUARY
It was the month of photoshoots and diagnoses: your skull is shaped like schizophrenia and you need to rest.
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KATIE CLARK Interviews FRANNY CHOI
The first time I heard one of Franny Choi’s poems was a beautiful accident. It was senior year and I was driving home from my last day of Spoken Word Club. In my sentimentality and premature nostalgia I made a YouTube queue of recent popular poems. When Franny Choi’s “Pussy Monster” came on, I was […]
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Jessie Knoles Interviews Yuna Winter
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 9:36 PM Yuna Winter hi jessie !! i am home and sitting down, i just thought of u and wanted to let u know i am here hi !! Jessie Knoles hello!!!! how are you? Yuna Winter hii i am well !! a little sleepy but very good how are you Jessie […]
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Bethany Mary on “On that one-way trip to Mars” by Marlena Chertock
Marlena Chertock’s debut poetry collection, “On that one-way trip to Mars,” is both warm and chilling, covering not only the expanse of the solar system but also of human emotions and experiences. It is a complete balance of history, science, medicine, and the nature of humanity. All of these areas of life affect each other. […]
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Katie Clark Interviews Megan Falley
Megan Falley is in a word: sharp. Her poems have a sting to them that stays and her voice could silence a room. She is water running too hot in the best way. In addition to touring and teaching an online writing course called “Poems That Don’t Suck,” she is the author of three collections of […]
Read moreNeyat Yohannes on “Plastic Pájaros” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
She’s a self-proclaimed bruja, possibly a real actual pirate, a bookseller, and a nationally recognized spoken word poet who’s part of the 2015 National Poetry Slam championship winning team. Melissa Lozada-Oliva embodies all of these titles and can be found juggling them masterfully in Boston. She’s previously been published in Electric Cereal, Sidelines, Microchondria, and […]
Read morePUBLIC MENSTRUATION by DENISE NICHOLE ANDREWS
I like to fall sometimes. I like to see the blood. When it flows from my pores into rivers, dams, and streams- like velvet currents of rage and sorrow. I am open like a wound, raw and tender.
Read moreIN MY LAST RELATIONSHIP, I WAS A TELEVISION by HANNAH COHEN
You used to grope weather forecasts from my throat, beg me to say “I love you” with the subtitles on. and I hoped no children came from our union, in fear that I would birth late-night infomercials alone. We were thing and owner, watching, changing without a chance. —– Hannah Cohen is in her mid-20s, […]
Read moreNOTES ON TENDERNESS by KIKI NICOLE
i. & i once knew a Truthi swallowed it whole after we fuckedhow it crept thru on the down low,real slick,thick & heavy & embarrassing.love looked at me & exhaledgushed a song out of their mouth all“didn’t u like it?”i wanted to say it was all i had to live on.instead i lingered in the […]
Read moreGOD GIVES AN ELEGY by DIANA KHONG
my white willow name is doctor, creatorof cold sheets, levee raiser as i kisscheek & child, i am softer in my ownhands, but hard as light parsed through a man’s lens to empty cement giants and husk men i have left retrograding, i am sorryunder my heel: rainwater, my toe: typhooni am all weight, all heat — […]
Read moreBOUGHT AT THE INTERSECTION OF 5TH AND MAIN by DIANA KHONG
if i am dead, then you are dying and we both have no recollection of a hard face-full of linoleum tile. if i was a drink, i’d be drunk; we are singing hymns from our cross-legged pew days. me, running my heel up the inside of your thigh. we, pretending we’re alive because we’re flesh […]
Read moreIN WHICH I HIDE LOVE LIKE LOCKS IN MY STOMACH FOLDS by DIANA KHONG
in red season, my teeth hang off hingesand i’m tonguing door stops with myknees staked into the linoleum untilyou are home again.you loved me once before i knew whata past tense was and netted myself ina set of skeleton keys, that is my body,i say; i say it — my body is hereyou loved me […]
Read moreTHE STARE DOWN, THE STONE COLD STUFF by EMILY PALERMO
sometimes, i still feel the heat of every hand that’s wandered across my body. shaking always shaking, earthquake veins, an uncertainty in the world, stepping on the ledge and looking straight down, neck tingling at a ninety degree
Read moreCAKE MAKING by ARCHITA MITTRA
mum’s polka-dotted apron would be stained brown and yellow; a child would peer at the strange orange universe inside a yolk and a crow would search for treasure inside empty egg shells lounging in the sun.
Read more& SO I CLIMBED by EKİN AYDOĞDU
& so i climbed the fig tree in my grandparent’s backyard, so i sat there the entire summer of my sixteenth year, ate nothing but figs – unripe, overripe, hard, soft, juicy, sweet, sticky, cracked open like my […]
Read moreVAGABOND CITY interviews HELEN ROBERTSON
Helen Robertson‘s collages encourage us to look at the world in an entirely different way, to see each other and the space between us as layered instead of separate, colors pooling and building to build a reality maybe none of us can see all at once. It made us feel thoughtful, and inspired, and connected. […]
Read moreDIALTONE by AMANDA ROSE
Our mother named you after a lighthouse keeper from a book she read once and I always wondered, when she told me that, if she thought you would be her salvation because it certainly seemed that way with how she spent those hours secluded in her room talking to you on the phone while I […]
Read moreHOW TO LET GO AND START BEING YOURSELF by AMANDA ROSE
Obsession is something that happens to people who aren’t so together. You have a full time job. Forty hours, on the nose. A four-door sedan—moderate, comfortable. You sit in rush hour for forty minutes, both ways, every day. You eat four meals, usually. Your life is full of four. This. That. You aren’t obsessed. You […]
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Vagabond City Interviews Hannah Kreitzer
Hannah Kreitzer’s art tells stories that have been woven into the fabrics of the Earth, but often get forgotten as we move our attention from the cell phone to the laptop. Her sketches celebrate the bare bones of humanity–something deep and instinctual. She reminds us that at some point, we were not so separate from […]
Read moreLesley LeRoux on “The Irresponsible Magician” by Rebekah Rutkoff
It’s tricky to pin down what, exactly, The Irresponsible Magician is, but that’s the fun of it – it defies genre. A work that weaves between essay and fiction, Rebekah Rutkoff’s collection from Semiotext(e) is exploratory and pushes beyond what we have often come to expect from our books – that extra readability that comes […]
Read moreNeyat Yohannes on A NT by Elijah Pearson
The Lyte Funkie Ones, better known as LFO, were responsible for the infamous 1999 classic, “Summer Girls.” A laundry list of non sequiturs strung together to create a single—allegedly about girls who wear Abercrombie and Fitch—that topped the music charts with seemingly unrelated lines like “When you take a sip/you buzz like a hornet/Billy Shakespeare […]
Read moreBethany Mary on “Daughters of Monsters” by Melissa Goodrich
If you read Melissa Goodrich’s “Daughters of Monsters” very slowly, concentrating on each sentence, the book will change you. Each story will change you in the same but slightly different way, because each story has a theme of transformation. The opening story provides a lesson in impermanence with a shape-shifting Cinderella, adaptable but empty, every […]
Read moreVagabond City Interviews Lorenza Centi
Lorenza Centi is a artist whose work feels tumblr-ready in a way that means it knows our souls, it knows the poems typed into the notes on our iphones, it knows the hurt we embody in young skin and tired muscle. It is pink, and young, but no less serious; it is easily called edgy, […]
Read moreTHE HONEY BADGER by MOLLY HARRIS
You and Leroy are in the Moon’s parking lot. Leroy always says that if you go between the hours of 1 and 3 am, you won’t have to deal with the police department. Leroy was never wrong. The Moon is the highest point in St. Charles County. It is a 75-foot tall pile of grey […]
Read moreFAMILIA/FAMILY: ON FAMILY, LANGUAGE, AND WALLS by EUGENIA VELA
We are on the I-37 halfway between Austin and South Padre Island, Texas. We started our trip late today, the pink sky already changing to a deep orange on our rearview mirror. It’s my favorite time. When my husband and I drive together to Savannah, Nashville or the closest Texas town, we reach a point […]
Read moreTHE STAIRCASE AND WHAT IT DID by KATIE CLARK
i am watching you walk where your feet, smaller then, stumbled | muddied | blistered pre-bound, pre-ballet, danced differently. what if i knew where i was when you were still- child laying your legs’ down roadside, blonde hairs blooming
Read moreACE OF CUPS by ALINA PLESKOVA
In an alternate version of today, I corner each whim w/ a lullaby Hush—there’s nothing interesting about a resistible urge Instead, a card left face up so its forces leak, lap the hours
Read moreBLUE SHIRT MAN by URVI KUMBHAT
Raindrops gathered on my nose like a piercing. It was that just awake, yawning Delhi rain Leaving me not quite wet not quite dry I am quite honestly lost in these gullies Rain has that faraway look in my eye quality— It scoops out my soul and scatters it in the dirt. Swanky house Block […]
Read moreHOLY FEVER by KEITH J. CASTILLO
I had a dream where ashes rained down from the sky the night made so black it felt primal in the dream my father is saying ‘sacrifice.’
Read moreDUST BOWL by STEVEN CHUNG
I travel westward to reach earlier time zones. Cross a line and I am an hour younger, though my body doesn’t know it. I will extend my life this way: by crossing borders. My ancestors did the same because they knew that the only hometown is the skin,
Read moreENTOMOLOGY by IAN HILL
A blush of night-bloom. That exquisite last word. In the type of family that could afford To fall apart, a young girl grows More hands than things to cling to. She’s Just thumbnail innocence, motel white Wallpaper thighs and perforated silence In glitter flecked too-open hands.
Read moreSOFT by VICTORIA BUTLER
A boy is burning in my bed and as I watch his face disappear I curse the world for teaching me how to be everything but water.
Read moreCOGNITIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY (CBT) by SAMANTHA CHEH
I sometimes wonder how, when I am not paying attention, from behind me, like a cinematic ghost, you creep back into the creases of my skin, where the sister-parts of my arms meet, the length of them seeming to break in two. Stiff like joss sticks burning down to ash, propped up in bricks laid […]
Read moreTHE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH AND OTHER NICETIES” by ALISON GRAHAM
I was the fishes’ lungs, the earrings 1 on your daughter and polyphonic you were checking the time. – a hell of a way to go, uprooting leg hair 3 and the picnic plate tongued by flies. When the news called me exceptional they spoke into a microphone of me: the […]
Read moreLesley LeRoux on “Double Teenage” by Joni Murphy
There are always those early friendships that shake you. My first ‘best friend,’ as with most first friendships, came to me out of a mixture of proximity and shared interests but also a need to engage with friendship and connection in a deep, all-consuming way. Sleepovers were a must. We had to be around each […]
Read moreNeyat Yohannes on Surveys by Natasha Stagg
“One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my past was too great.” (8) This is the story Natasha Stagg tells in Surveys with astounding exactness and understanding of that esoteric corner of the internet of which we all, at […]
Read moreIn which Vagabond City talks books, because #NationalBookLoversDay
rachel [4:21 PM] hey @channel – since it’s national book lovers day, can we do a thing to share everyone’s favorite books? chelsea [4:25 PM] It’s so hard to choose though! abby [4:27 PM] The Virgin Suicides, And the Mountains Echoed, andddd Pride & Prejudice. @cardle you’re right so hard to choose
Read moreBethany Mary on This Is A Clothespin by Lucas Scheelk
“This Is A Clothespin” is a work of art that provides an intersectional education in such a creative way, it is mindblowing to realize how much you are learning and enjoying it. Lucas Scheelk invokes the clothespin image to describe self-harm and the pinch of discomfort when the public is not a safe space, encouraging […]
Read more19149 by LAURA BRZYSKI
Mom read x-rays for a living, but made a life kissing the bones of a 1932 row home always under construction Dad repairing with arthritic hands from the ground up
Read moreEDITORS on WATER
Prompt: 100 words on water. Give it a shot and tag us on Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter & we’ll show you some love! Bright summer nails look like bits of coral floating through the water, I think, as my hand grazes the lake. I wipe five coral fingers on my melon shirt. Solo wears orange […]
Read moreDISAPPEARING IN BEACON HILL by cj west
You are a hitchhiker’s brainwash, a negative gasmask, a pair of waiting hands vacant everywhere You are a hoarder of ridges, a concave risk, heartsick and craving bludgeon exchange in a room of soundless piano keys, pushed in. Lonely carnivore, with a dirty forehead a mouth of murder. You beautiful handsaw, ripping my roots to […]
Read moreBODY SAY WHAT IT FEELS LIKE by cj west
being touched in a charged body by accident bounces bones enough to shed dead skinand leave flesh behind to finagle steady breath without a frame of mind barely attached to a torso danglingout of the car window even if hanging on means swallowing the one-winged mosquitos or pounding a steak until the vesselsrun dry and deformed or become […]
Read moreSPLATTER by cj west
—– cj west is a 20 yr old junior at Emerson College, where they created a major in Performance Poetry. They don’t care what your parents think of her tattoos. Their favorite things are: cats, bread, and women. Two they’re allergic to, one is out to get them. If they can’t change the world they […]
Read moreMISDIAL TONE by cj west
hi you might like the way the moon looks will you go outside and see for yourself put the phone down first open the door then close it take however long you need to make up your mind if you don’t come back before time runs out i won’t blame you doesn’t it look like […]
Read moreVagabond City Interviews Emma Ensley
In a word, Emma Ensley’s work is magical. It sparkles and lives and mixes mediums in a way that complicates each piece. As soon as we saw it, we were moved to send a rambling email about how stunning stunning stunning it was, and would she be interested in being featured? A total sweetheart, Emma […]
Read moreCOVET by LAUREN MILICI
you kept my amethyst in your jacket / so I put a new piece of citrine in your palm / we sit at the bar & talk about cemeteries / tell me about your father again / talk about New York / that one time you were onstage dripping with blood & your best friend […]
Read moreQUEER (IN RETROSPECT) by AUDREY T. CARROL
15 and she invited me to sleep over at her place minimal adult supervision hours one and two dedicated to mocking a children’s movie because we were not children she let me test drive her violin, first string instrument I ever touched, told me my instinct by way of heritage
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