Vagabond City Literary Journal

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, […]

Suddenly / late summer / shirtless in the loft / he watches me / surmount the top rung / Soft timothy exhaling June / The twine breaks / spreading blue / purple florets on which we lie / about men / the Virgin / glistening skin / senators and welfare / other things we cannot […]

I. It’s tough to admit, but I can’t stopbaby-talking to the guillotinein my closet. I can’t stop wearing orangeand clicking like a house in the sun.I just want to find love, testifyto the power of pedestrian walkwaysthrough the minefields of early death.No reason for me to be inconclusive,circus-like in my heart. I belongto the ice […]

Three days after swearing off sex, I message an old tinder date. We talk about coming home to ourselves, recovery, and tarot. She asks me, in what ways do you want to be more grounded?  And I want to tell her about Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, how fifteen hundred steel spheres lay on the ground, and reflect via convex—how the viewer […]

            After Antonín Dvořák Mvt. I: Allegro in / the belly / of / the woods / we toss kindling into a pit // jagged geometry /of combustion // strike matches on our skin //watch the campfire work / its teeth through mountain blackness // & I am incendiary // north windlurching / in from / upper / […]

                      a hue of hospital neon                       sits above exposed cotton guts                                  of waiting room sofa in the early hours of my procession, morning orange draws a halo            around my pale head.  there’s a field in the midwest where be a man still echoes            off the corners of tick-painted weeds resting atop a cliff overlooking a shallow marsh.  it is too late to go back,                                  one of the […]

                                                     after Anne Sexton’s “Yellow” When I finally feel safety again I’ll work it around in my mouthuntil it’s all balled up, I’ll spit it out, I’ll bury it shallow in a loamy field. I’ll plant a shield of sunflowers around it, I’ll encircle them with apricotpits, I’ll pluck every downy feather in sight, I’ll write a poem called Feral […]