i. Sonic We eat in his car, parked, light off, radio on, watching the sun set over the edge of suburbia. Romantic-like. If we wanted, the identical tops of a hundred gable roofs in the distance could almost look like mountains, the heat waves off of the hot summer pavement the surface of a cool […]
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I like to call this counting crows. A boy told me he liked me while I was high and crying listening to some indie bullshit. My ex girlfriend smoked everyday, 3:11 pm, after school in her backyard, and I guess that is sort of cringeworthy. Tell me you like me. I like to call this […]
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the beat of your heart– one. two. three. four. the gleam of your sweat– heat. shimmer. hips. quiver. the almond of your eyes– green. kind. honey. mine. the space behind your ribs– ache. flood. furnace. blood. the palm of your hand– red. flower. touch. devour. the bend of your thumb– square. raw. hook. trace. the soft […]
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girl liking boys and girls girl hating labels; hating boxes, but girl loving; always loving. girl falling for crooked smiles; the quiver of eye lashes like leaves in the wind, protecting cobalt irises full of love; full of empathy.
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I. The night is alive and so am I. II. Maybe instead of the wildfire I long to be I should be a rolling storm. III. Or maybe just the shadows. Maybe the night is harsher than the day.
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My first roommate in the adolescent unit had most growing on her arms and spots of mold between her toes. I didn’t realize until months later that there is nothing beautiful about that.
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i. I am the mood swings striking in the middle of the night, keeping you nocturnal past three in the morning. They call me mania, bipolar. I am your misdiagnosis, the ADHD pills that made you go insane, the tug of impulse when manic becomes the new normal.
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“Darling, dearest, dead,” Sovereign queen of my heart: You’re the sunset in a cup, you’re the ink bleeding into my marginalia of Aristotle, Kant, and Luther, and in the candlelight alone your face shines ever new across the gradient of my half-worn pages.
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To be a construction of signs of sighs, remembering memories of encounters that were dreams— meeting-places in the dark.
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The bare-breasted nun prays in front of children as their parents snap photos of anything but her body. She is not the memory they want of this place. Her habit hangs far below her puckered lips, and for $45, she’ll show you what spring is like on Jupiter.
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There are yellow roses at Mary’s feet and two fingers missing from her right hand. She looks fragile, but the other at the pulpit looks more like a harlot. Jimi Hendrix would enjoy
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He has to be a white man, under six feet mid-forties intelligent a George Clooney chin
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it’s natural to be afraid, watching the birth and death of the day. this is your catastrophe and the cure,
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when i was young and heading east these ashes weren’t counterfeit. we avoided
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Pregnancy was everywhere. That’s what happens after having really good unprotected sex. I bragged about it to my best friend: about how my lover and I had been spontaneous and placed our bets on the pull-out method, how I’d broken my rule of saying his name. Hundreds of miles away and with her face bright […]
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white powder runs down his nose his laugh is ragged
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Ze sold sea shells by the sea shore no not really Ze sold sex by the pier It was amusing the look on people’s faces The deadpan expression to the straightforward question
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In my dream I carry a mason jar filled with bits of Einstein’s brain (stolen before the rest of him was ashes), pieces they still haven’t found. I run up the stony steps of Gaudi’s basilica in Barcelona (built 1882 and finished never). Spires high, bricks laid, most of it a skeleton of becoming. Some […]
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He called her bruja so she prayed day in and day out over hemlock and wart of toad that he would let her leave. Braided ribbons of thorn into her hair in lieu of satin. At night it purled and crawled
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The water is next to the bed. I am having those dreams where I am awake again. Whispering take your fingers away in sleepy protest moans.
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The asphalt of summer stood still. Swum the deep end of mother’s disease and dreamed of dangling from telephone wires, calling the world to watch from under the table.
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Swimming in between stubborn kindergarten gums, my mouth is full of blood. We pull up to that blue house while the kitchen curtain is on fire.
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I speak the language of a vanilla-flavoured day. Just beige pastels, and an ordinary tint of a café-au-lait. I have spent a lifetime crawling over a blanket of shells, just to coat my bones in the achromatic pain of synonymity so that my crescendo of affliction remains unheard,
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I have this theory, That for six days, I could maybe keep a goldfish alive long enough so that I could see you again. On day one, I would watch the salesman pull it out from its home, and tuck it into a bag filled with more air than water.
Read moreFROM: Rachel Charlene Lewis [Editor] The writers in this issue are overwhelmingly not straight, not white, not male, not established; the writers in this issue are women, they are queer, they are young, they are of color; this, in itself, to me, is magic.
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I am valued only in triptych, in tandem with someone and the services I can provide. Rolling out like the underfoot mat I so often am, belly up or arse in the air, I aim to be agreeable and end up flat on my back, fucked like a newlywed. Not enjoying it,
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Editor’s note – trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence I. buckle-punctuated tenderness, steaming vodka lips press to my neck / the church spire spears swollen dawn, i cry / make you drive me home, sneak inside before my mother stirs / thank you for not making me ask twice. II. your mouth melts gold […]
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Editor’s note: trigger warnings for sexual assault, suicide a college student asked me if it was true that i’d fuck him for booze; he said he knew how i liked it,
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smoke the bowl. it’ll put you to sleep. you and your best friend smoke out the window in the middle of the night and you both dream that the room is on fire. you’ve started having dreams that he’s kidnapping you. they stick in the back of your head even when you’re saying i love […]
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Drifting Away Numb, and I cannot use this hidden shade of blue, Evening and the noise is everything but music, Mother is screaming, and I do not live for the bible, Mother is screaming, because I do not live for the bible,
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I. I used to deny it Pretend I didn’t see it And now I devour every bit of blackness I lick my fingers clean
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Few things give me more anxiety than going to the dentist. The moment I walk into the office, with the high-pitched whirrs of the drill piercing my ears, my primal instincts kick in to high gear, and I have to stop myself from bolting out the door. Even as I write this, I feel a […]
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Editor’s note: I’ve decided to group these two poems because they respond well to each other. Be aware that there seems to be a theme of sexual assault/abuse. Honey Honey let us take you home tonight so we can rob you of your arms and then put them on again backwards so you’ll always remember […]
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The girl next to me strains as though she’s on a quest, not an elliptical. Constant sweat, an occasional groan. She keeps murmuring, “Oh God. Oh God.”
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“We’re going to be man slayers,” you told me, fox eyes glimmering. We were nine, on the playground. I knew you would be, with your sharp, fast grin and trickster ways. Already you were revolutionary. You moved through the woods like a sprite daring and limber among the sweet-smelling eucalyptus as we searched for fairies […]
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Inner Thighs sext: I hesitate to use the word beautifully to describe the way you open yourself like a coral-reef in bloom to me, but I’m prismatic too; I fuck you like an oil spill.
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The first man to name me “goddess” was twenty-one and drunk on gin. Breath heavy with lust and booze, he told me that most nights he carved poems into the walls trying to write me alive in the room with him, so when the light hit the scrapes just right, he could catch his breath […]
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While the show swells forward through its scenes— the windfall of sex, and the sudden twist ending where all good fortune is reversed—
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Sometimes I swear there’s a rock in my stomach. It shakes a little when I lie on my back at night, staring up at the starburst-textured cement ceiling of my bedroom. The rock is always there, but there’s something about the time I take to fall asleep that makes it want to be known, like […]
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Sometimes I sit and stare at the coils of the bunk above me tracing their weaving pattern as if they were some sort of pathetic man-made constellation. And I think of all the ridiculous ways I compare you to others.
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Like all of your ex-girlfriends swirled into one The Hippie becoming the Shaking Limbed The Almost But It Never Happened becoming the Fantasy Like your mother offering you a tangerine
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The first girl I ever kissed had a mouthful of luring words and veins full of Percocet. I wore the potent perfume of pineapple vodka on my breath and wilted forward into her lap, all curled up at the edges like a water-logged book. We were perched on the end of a leather couch in […]
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My first crush was in love with Patrick Dempsey. So I used to watch Grey’s Anatomy so I’d have something to talk to her about.
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VAGABOND CITY 