DARK BEAUTY | Andiswa Onke Maqutu
“You are too black.” “I’m sorry.” The make-up artist filed through a brown palette of bottles of foundation in annoyed haste. Her purple tinted nails clawed at them and they clamoured over each other in protest. “I have all the colours here; toast, cappuccino, caramel, cocoa, mocha… even mahogany. But I don’t have your colour, […]
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EVERYTHING TO NOTHING | McKenzie Dial
I. The dash, scattered with photographs of the girls you had kissed, and me, sitting in the passenger seat, placing my cheeks on the chilly tempered glass, never wishing that one of those pictures might be of me. Your summer breath – popcorn hulls, jalapeño juice, tobacco leaves – all so close to my mouth, […]
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FAGGOT YOUTH | aung.robo
OPEN SEASON | Torii Johnson
People in the south have mouths that cradle their vowels like a hunter holds his gun. Don’t kiss in the car in case we get run off the road. Speak slow ‘round the molasses of their thoughts and savor the sound.
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LOOKING LOW | Susannah Betts
MEMORIES OF LOVING A GIRL WHO SANG THE SOUL ELECTRIC | Martina Dominique Dansereau
i. Her eyes caused earthquakes, tectonic plates colliding and sparks leaping from her gaze into mine when they crashed, inciting tremors beneath my skin. The way my synapses fired love letters from neuron to neuron to every part of my body until it tingled with love like a fever coursing hot- and-cold from her sly […]
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A Stonefruit | Clair Dunlap
TWO YEARS LATER I TELL HIM VERY CLEARLY TO STOP TALKING TO ME. I USE THE CONCISE PHRASES I DO NOT LIKE YOU AND I DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO YOU STOP TALKING TO ME I TELL HIM AND HE REPLIES AFFIRMATIVELY. I TELL HIM AND WHEN MY BOYFRIEND LEAVES THE KITCHEN AND HE […]
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ART BY ABBY CARON
SITA | Lakshmi Mitra
i. janaka loves me the way one loves a goddess, but not the way one loves a child. he says my hair is like a clear sky on a moonless night, my eyes are blooming with starfire, my skin is the bottled radiance of a setting sun. but i want him to say that he […]
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RITES OF AN OLD WAR | Sophia E. Terazawa
Imagine the struggle for interracial love as a series of group discussions, nothing more. Nobody shrieks and flies for the throat. Plates, unbroken. Ground rules. “Safe” space. Imagine that the interpersonal work against racism is at a round table, in a concert hall, within a forum. Nothing more. Curated. Conducted. Logged. To my mother, Angelina […]
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ODE TO MONTEREY BAY//OR// THE FIRST POEM THAT IS NOT ABOUT LOSS | Emily Alexander
the first poem without road sign poles, empty of direction. the first poem without missing teeth i know all about borrowed bodies. i was born landlocked, with a cup inside my chest, oceans deep. in california, the highway between my house and downtown traces the outlines of the pacific, both nervous bodies reaching, spooning, matching […]
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CEILING | Léna García
Palm trees and military barracks fade white from the sun, the way it was before they got here and plucked all the butterflies, like candles from cake, and rust red water poured into rivers mixing red dirt with ocean, forming clay, the kind I painted and sold on the sides of desert freeways. 1964. The […]
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I AM AN ATLANTEAN EFFORT ON MYSELF | Meryem Nuh
you do not know. i move from room to room. every morning. moistening my eyes. sucking in my belly. pruning my fingers in juice of mango. weathering my history on my forehead. the women in me want different things. breathing with my hair. rubbing honey cinnamon and shine of the moon on the inside of […]
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THIS WILL DESTROY YOU | Bethany Mary
My coworker asks me what I’m doing with my life, as if this is a question I know the answer to instead of one I ask myself every day. She also asks me why I don’t use my low reserves of energy to find a boyfriend. Through the haze of depression and chilling dreams, I […]
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SEPIA | Fortesa Latifi
looking back, everything is sepia to me now: the pills, the shaking, the undressing, your neck in the shadow of the lost night, the pills, your hair cut over the bathroom sink, the broken front door,
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ON OLD POTS AND NEW YEARS | Bee Walsh
Mama told me it’s important to cast a spell around nightfall on the first day of the New Year. Some years I forget & maybe those weren’t some of my best, but as the onions caramelize in the bottom of my oldest pot, I whisper some of the other secrets Mama told me about new […]
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VAGABOND CITY | ISSUE VII
This winter, we simmered. We became beings sunken beneath water, boiling. We became beings, warm and thinking, looking back. We were destroyed. Our cells were returned to the world as heat as we sat, invisible in our nothingness, floating or sinking or maybe being nothing at all, maybe just nothing, warmed, nothing, stripped, nothing, stunning […]
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SHARPIE ART | Amira Simon
A CONVERSATION WITH AN IMAGINARY FRIEND | Becky Yeker
What does it feel like to feel? It feels like the thoughts of every living person are inside of you, like they are thumping against the side of your head and they are reflecting off of your eyeballs like they are mirror images of yourself, even when they are not you. Does it feel like […]
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BITS ON SOUR BOYS | Naomi Langer
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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COUNTING CROWS | Olivia Ladun
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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THIS IS THE CLOSEST I’LL GET TO PAINTING YOU | Ayah Elbeyali
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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GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS AND GIRLS | Jemma Hoolahan
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 AM EXACTLY LIKE A WIND STORM | Maia Irwin
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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GABY, HAVE YOU DONE YOUR BEST? | Kaitlyn Crow
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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UNTITLED #1| Kaitlyn Crow
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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Digital Photography | Ysidro Xylander
FROM KIERKEGAARD TO REGINE | Alex Lenkei
“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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GAPS | Alex Lenkei
To be a construction of signs of sighs, remembering memories of encounters that were dreams— meeting-places in the dark.
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LITTER ON THE STREETS OF LAS VEGAS | Nicole Lourette
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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ST. ANTHONY’S RELIQUARY | Nicole Lourette
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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THE CRITERIA BY WHICH MY MOTHER SELECTS A FATHER FOR HER CHILD | Nicole Lourette
He has to be a white man, under six feet mid-forties intelligent a George Clooney chin
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ALL OF A SUDDEN I MISS EVERYONE (EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY) |Michael Prihoda
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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DARKEST HOURS (FOX AND THE BIRD) | Michael Prihoda
when i was young and heading east these ashes weren’t counterfeit. we avoided
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LOVECHILD | Negesti Kaudo
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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Two Photographs | Shanning Wan
UNTITLED | Sarah Francois
white powder runs down his nose his laugh is ragged
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SEA SHELLS | Sarah Francois
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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Bits | Neobie Gonzalez
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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Dorothy Faces the Tornado | Meggie Royer
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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LYING NEXT TO SOMEONE YOU DON’T LOVE. | Elizabeth Tobin
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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ALMOST HEAVEN | Elizabeth Tobin
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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Losing Teeth | Elizabeth Tobin
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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FOR THE AVERAGE MELIPHONA BEE | Inara Lalani
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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AN AQUARIUM FOR THE DEAD| Inara Lalani
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 moreISSUE 6: NOTES FROM OUR EDITORS
FROM: 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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Fluid | Sarah Pinkerton
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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13 POEMS FOR SOULS HOUSED BY BODIES I HAVE COLLIDED WITH | Chantal Paloma
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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the last time i tried to kill myself and was too ashamed to tell my therapist | Abigail Staub
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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