Vagabond City Literary Journal

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 […]

His long arms are warm and it is one a.m.some galloping horse traveling to me from the lapping midnight of a recent orgasm and I am out of breath this worknight— his death, the garnet dancer that lurks in all my most winking brights. On the pillow where our heads rest, nose to nose, screw […]

split my lip for the innocence i knowlies beneath: i think i almost drownedthis summer & the swimming pool wherei tried is on fire now. this body feelsstrange & hollow, halfway between anexhale & something else. i want sunsets.i want rooftops. i want to be uninhabitable,light falling through an open window. need to be something […]

I would like to believe we live forever, and when I say forever,I mean we live longer than our favorite song.Don’t let anyone tell you forever has to feel so guilty, so strained, a cauterized theory of letting go.I haven’t the language to hope you get home safely,but I have the muscle memory of holding […]

after Neko Case When I find the morning I pull it from the groundand whisper an invocation. Across these counties, I’ve left myself motherless, let myself bear the name emergency when I kick up dust. The name ghost when I’m out of breath. But even in this apocalypse every constellation bears your name. And in […]

Once, very drunk, I read aloud a poem about lov[ing you] after a friend had just vomited all over the comforter and was moaning guts. I thought: I’ll show her how shame can laugh at itself, bare on a pulpy blanket. Look; it’s just us, bags of bile, hanging out. Besides, dim rooms are for […]