Vagabond City Literary Journal

you sprawl across the thistle of a weedy slope, bones splayed over the hill-belly,friends beyond your fingertips.fog between your teeth. you watch a scant coyote feebling along the flank. too much rib, less feral than winter. pluto yoking at the sun. light out of reach. this will become another day you don’t want to remember. it’s lucky you’re wired for forgetting. your housekeys,the trash you […]

For a brief moment I want to be (w)reckless—forget the weather, the smell of melted chocolate& jewelry rust on my grandmother’s dying skin.She said there were lemons growing outof my mouth. She knew the fruit but not my name. In the sun I am just another meltingthing. I smile at strangers with all my teeth.I […]

“Don’t promise a pumpkin and deliver a squash.” —Matthew Feinstein I. We nod. We sleep. We wake,wondering about the sun— every night, do we summon it?I wake up supercharged, heaving  barbells up a wall of mouths. I believe in poetry above all else. That doesn’t make me anythingbut a poor fish in a brilliant pond  of amniotic slug […]

Not the kingdom of God, being undecidedand all, nor the kingdom of this life, givenits many irregularities and the peach treewith its offspring of oranges but I admireand, dare I say it? love citrus and the decayit’s capable of. I’m capable if I want to be.It took this many years of licking salt cubes.I’m staring […]

I A swan is eating another swan.It is not beautiful.It is hideous, and bloody, and terrifying. It is also beautiful. II Your mother goes to the doctor and they finda shadow on her lung. When they open her up, insideher lung is a blossomed calendula. When the doctors askhow it got there she saysshe inhaled it […]

I’ve become adept at shepherdingheartbreak to minute areas of the body,treating the lesions with smoothing iron and ice in equal measure.  I’m an imperfect mechanism,an unskilled plough hand—my pastures razed, my stained bones fallow.  I wish to beat my armsinto an instrument more useful to a worldthat’s full and waitingwith cocked hammers.           The mystery in my body          is spoiling in this climate: […]

after Sandra Cisneros,             in a nutshell,  i have returned to you like                              the way death returns when one gets depressed. grief has unlit everything in me back & forth,                              but i am jealous of the veinsthat form smiles on my face. Yeshua is jealous of me,                              i can do what he can’t do of me.  hallowed be […]

on earth, golden silk orb-weavers build asymmetrical webs, with the hub—or center—positioned towards the upper edge. & it is here that they sit & wait, so that when theirprey does arrive, they might use gravity to pounce & kill, quickly. in 2011, these spiderswere sent to space. & scientists aboard the International Space Station discovered […]

for and after Kevin Bertolero Do you remember how it felt to be boys in the grass? Staining our every-thing, our nowripped jeans we wore through the knees? It was so big then, possibility; love waseverywhere and for everything. We rode our bikes to the base of the hill where theprefect tree was, we watched […]

Home Improvement Amongst the implied violenceof the chain and rope aisle at Home Depot,I am emboldened to make let’s-fuck eyes at strangers.Then the soft amber of the lighting fixture sectionwrings me out and I want someone to please comeand pick me up, pluck me from a mean girls’ sleepover,drive me home and put me to […]

Earth is a ringed planet. A teenage faggot is a body orbiting low atmosphere The ground and its people swing them up like discus, but not enough to break Escape velocity. Thousands of blue-haired children float in the solar breeze Like a Kubrickian slide. The richest men on Earth launch garbage into the stars Like […]