Vagabond City Literary Journal

next thought—isolation is a beautiful syringe. next thought—when i went to Chicago that summer i took the train.  Illinois is a whole lot of nothing. neutered landscapes in a lilting breeze. grain silos round as asses.  Midwestern topographies are bargain-bin paintings everyone wants hung in their bathroom, which is to say  something, probably. maybe i like to be […]

I ain’t the good kind of Asian. I’m the onewho disappoints you. I see it in your eyes when we go out for sushi and I forget what nigiri is. I feel it across your tattoos I’ll kiss someday:  koi fish samurai and fisherman’s wiveswide-eyed cats with claws outstretched characters faded indecipherable, strewn like wreckageacross your […]

her home-bleached hair, the strong smallness of her,the slippage of her soft walk in the rain,today this girl reminded me of you—the thrumming weight of how I wounded yousomehow inside the curve her shoulders made.I watched her blue shoes stir up limpid poolsof cloud-water, and my expired want  for you mixed itself in, gasping and soaked.last […]

            for Ryan Home in timeto watch a drunksun stumbling. It flashes its pink ass & jetslike little crucifixescross the sky: I know such audacity, the needto burn & then beburnished, the urge to vanish: I’ve drivenoff the road with darkintent. It’s just my hands that spared me.It’s scary, being so closeto the mirror you […]

To Illness, With Love i am sorry that i broke you or used you to break myself i amsorry for the commotion that followed i amsorry about the quotidian pain like a skipping record i amsorry for the pills thrown in a blender to help us i amsorry for waving your laundry in the faces […]

do you want to see a magic trick?would you like to try swallowing me whole?have you ever peeled open a tangerine?it’s like that, only you keep going, until there’s nothing leftbut infernos, do you see?can i ask you one more question?will you still kiss me when i look different?will you? will you? will you? how […]

The arch of the sky keeps pulling; no forecast of rain;Over us clouds undeveloped into silk chaining east to west. Above the tedious skyline the early sun brings colorsbrings news of a warm day. But we’ve become too lazy to imagine better days than this,both you and I, perched on the park bench,watching the brittle shadow […]

Summer again like a switchblade in my throat. We were girls then, gamboling in glades thick  and honey-sweet with clover. All of it belonged to us: the dusky purple scent of the tobacco fields,  the cicadas buzzing in the chest-high grass, the sleepless meadows only our feet tread.  We rinse the lake water from our hair and dream long […]

This is what is most familiar: Lemon-sucked lips kept still on skin.Fingers, long and knuckled, sweeping across a scar fainter than summer.The back and forth motion of keeping ourselves whole. How your smile,all honeyed and good, makes a hymn from its own ridges. You like to pick atyour palms like insects suck at bone. Your […]

tell me it was gentle,             like when my mother brushedthe hair from my forehead and said,                         if God wanted you to fly, He would have calledyou Icarus                                                 and with her feverish           fingertips                                                running through my roots I asked,                                                         do you want to be                                             Daedalus?  [name added to “when I transition” list: Icarus]  —  I wanted to give […]

maybe death isn’t deep and wet and cloying like / a well maybe death is /a shallowing a / drying up / think of the pond that forms / in the valleyfrom snowmelt in the spring think of how / it shrinks with each hot /summer day by august / it’s gone maybe our lives […]

Cockroaches / getting pregnant / never having children / menstrual cups / hanging upwithout saying I love you seconds before someone dies / my dad crashing on his way topick me up from the station / my train crashing, blood and bones and tangled hair lefton the tracks / sloths and their strange hands / […]

i want to devourmy loneliness& throw it upon the page.you told me oncepoems need each otherthe way humans do. that night,the moon was so brightit wrote your shapeon the sidewalk. you had eyesas wide as mercury& i rememberfalling into you,letting your handsclose around melike an atmosphere. in the morning,was the sun.in the morning,you kissed mein […]

My mother remembers teaching herselfhow to draw stars on a foggy windowwhen she was five, fifty-five years ago.Most of us look to the sky for release. My neighbor, at dinner, proposes thatwe are but molecules. That perhaps ouruniverse exists as one fabric weavedinto a shirt and our beyond just wool. Many places are full of […]

and suddenly I’m a moth serenading the stunned lightbulb. O winged glass, through your whorl of God’s deftness, from a corner of this midnightforest, do you see my broken nose, its septum tottering from indecision? How it spills blood like a waterfallforking gravity. When my uncle was depressed, I blamed it on his innate goodness. […]

we still believed in hot lemon water in the morning, still believed in the miracle of breaking out into a dance anywhere, never quieting down, the rookie optimism that our best parts would remain the same no matter where or who we shared them with. now every summer something like grief tears inside our bellies, […]

Today you will reorder yesterday for the sake oftomorrow. Something will bubble and froth behindyour left ear leaving behind a sensation like whenyou first bite into a perfect and juicy apple. I havean eye and a tongue and a soul for juice and so feelbold about this assertion. Even when we are apartmy mind fills […]

you tell me ice wants to be warm. a television screen, spastic with tiny spines,warm from my fingerprint smeared across its face. i do this to you, but i am not pricked. before work, a bundle of coriander stripped by the night’s wind on the porch-step.once, when little, i constructed a fence from the broken […]

“why am I growing out of myself” and the opening songis a gunshot wound that never closes up and inside exists a portal to thirteen where the slashed armstill bleeds black, drips until tar becomes speed bump but we have already tripped over the casualties ofgrowing up too fast and there are no longer picnics […]

after “Poem After Reading the Chapter in Stephen King’s It Where the Word ‘Kike’ Appears Six Times” by Hannah Cohen, “gelato” by Matt Mitchell, & “in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say” by Danez Smith the adriatic sea is a body of water, so etymologically i am born from pockets of salt / […]

HornyTopNow proposes a sexorcism            in your DMs when he writes: let me fuck the hell out of you He must think his penis is God’s            gift if he can save you from damnation, but you don’t believe him.            You’re atheist & to you, angels are just            a slutty Halloween costume. If there is a devil, […]