vagabondcitypoetry

Plato I had gone to your chapelon a wintry November night.Your sage scattered everywhere—in the air, in the water,in the earth, where I stareddeeply into the well of your eyes,a kind of abyssal charm.I went barefoot to see you.I climbed up the hillunflinchingly, Plato.I hauled your books like a bovine yakup the hillbilly brae of […]

Strap on the seatbeatas you leap off the cliff. Rinse the recyclables so they siton a landfill. Never raise your middle fingerbecause you can’t take it back. Be careful.Did you bring an extra pack of tissues. You quitsmoking ten years ago and you hate vegetables secretly.You want to walk with Marco, who lived acrossNorth Boulevard on the […]

We will learn the namesof the land, of the plantsthat were & the plants that remain Hand-counting bladesof grass until our tonguesgo numb chanting the sequence Music will be conducted by birdsong;extra credit if you can identifytheir new migratory patterns Our Art teacher is the still-lifeof a prairie dawn across the fields,a fresh chiaroscuro each […]

when I die bury meat the root of othergreen minded individuals. ones who know that evenmost things in technologymimic the best parts of nature. bury me withgrass that welcomes dandelionsand some weeds with petals whom move like solar panelsneeding to prove the sun exists.bury me with proof of life. don’t talk about the maggots.let the […]

Like the time we snuck into the open houseoff Park Avenue, relishing in what we had never known:open doors and floor to ceiling windows.And when the blonde realtor questioned your accent,humming a prayer against the backs of her teeth,we smiled and scurried away,our laughter drowning out the slap of our sneakers against the sidewalk.High off […]

over early coffee, a friend reminds you how young you truly are, howyour head & heart are developing with a rapidness too invisible to praise. it feels so obvious, yet you forget all the time.look, every day you unveil a new shadeof yourself, strange unseen tones bleedingtogether on your palette. lookhow your face has shifted its shape over […]

is the worst possible method of acquiring information.i never like what i learn & i refuse to listen to reporters who dress in colors you won’t find in thewoods: horrible dark greys, blacks, & maroons.            seeking answers, i take matters           into my own hands: i walk around & ask           every animal i see on a scale of 1 […]

Stand in the morgue and listento the hush between last breaths and statistics,where silence weighs heavier than data points,certainty is measured in empty homes and call medicine poison.Let mistrust metastasize like mold in flood-ravaged cities,watch fever slip through cracks in your rhetoric whileruin joins it in drought-cracked soil because disease is the freest thing of […]

everything was fireproof and temperateand the sky was whole and holding waterspace was clean and time was sloweveryone loved and believed in love orbelieved love would come they wonderedthey cried but their tears were waterfor uncooked seedseveryone was truthful and their names werefamiliar and their faces were familiar andtheir bodies were familiar and beautiful andeverything […]

wading in a lake of swing dance music, jeans rolled up to the knee-you were there with a sweat-soaked bandana on your head-this was a dance under twinkling electric lights in your backyard.the Moon was out, the stars were out, your smile was out, it was all gleaminglike a streetlight shining down on a graveyard […]

Zigzag across the road only whenYou’re sure you’re safe, when the headlights aren’t burningXrays of your bones onto the concrete. Dark enoughWhere all i can see are the whites of your eyes. your Voice carries over distant traffic, jubilant and trembling.Unbelievable, how you carry onTough as teeth through the winter when the airScrapes at the insides […]

she lies in her bed and tries to dream tries to make this world fade away because dreams are like bubbles of unreality popping and pearling iridescent shine addictive like the stuff in her father’s pipe smoke like haze like mist like dreams her dreams are safe her dreams are prophecies and she dreams of […]

I keep picturing bugs when I think of my body:maggots crawling across white fleshsteaming in the heatrib cage open to the elements. I wish my brain would stop going there,acknowledge the breath in my lungsand claim that as good enough,but my body feels alien. I picture brambles growing through it,vines tangled in the holes of […]

HoodwinkedVantablackWarm food with hot drinksIce cream sells more in colder climatesDuolingo for body languageand facial expressionsPeople saying ‘awkward’ only making it soAn abundance of usernames already takenSame page, different booksAndele andeleBurnt brown sugar, failed caramelRust growing between our toes while illnesses try to gain popularitySludge mind—brain rotRealistic fantasies of traffic and waiting roomsLofty adjectives for […]

Forget about biology and focus on minutiae.Break the smallest parts of body and mindinto opportunities for decay. Seed it well. Deny points of view until teeth crumble,vision blurs with tears. When battered,even the strongest soul softens. Once fatigue roots itself against actionanyone can be collapsed.With patience eventually any body learnshow to die—a little at a […]

after Sharon Olds’ Never Saw my mattress-on-the-floor first apartmentmy met-at-the-student-union first boyfriendthe year they said the world would endI had to do it before the world would endroommates shouting through the wall in mockerydroplets of breath collecting on cold winter glasssummoning mold and other irritants thrift store couches and drives in Greta,my Honda with a failing […]

Cody Stetzel is a Seattle resident working within communications and ethical technologies. They are a contributing writer for Tupelo Quarterly and the Colorado Review, where they offer reviews and criticism of contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and more. They are a volunteer organizer and event staff for Seattle’s poetry bookstore Open Books: A Poem Emporium. […]

The cliffside acts as morsel to the seawater feasting on rockCollapsible chairs sit unevenly along the cliff’s edge This is a weddingMy wedding dayA marriage of body and bodyBut for meit is a reckoningThis dormant queerness in me erupts And somewheremy father sitsmy mother and sister toowaiting for the ceremony to beginBut offstageI am threading […]

The first high school reunion is a funeral.Afterwards, we chainsmoke in the backyard because language isn’t always enoughto get us through. There are people still alive in this world who need me (you) &feeling fluctuates though freeways refuse.I know the route & want it over withsince no one teaches in a ghost-cluttered classroom, except for […]

i was once mistaken for sunlight – soon i will be nothing again – i now dream only – of green compost bins – & the first law of thermodynamics – when he first picked me – the plantation was still green – chloroplast woven ionic sets – he called me yellow – & my […]

This morning was one of those mornings when I felt   distance, between my daughters and me. Now an ocean away, now living lives I follow on Instagram. With people I don’t know. How strange to hold a being inside, to feel that first kick to the ribs (a sign that life is becoming) and then,  […]

You can build it [1] You can build a math equation you can build a rocket you can build the brass-bright saxophone you can build the artery as it greasily explodes you can build the lightning strike you can build the star dense but fuzzy from light years away you can build the walls of […]

All this beauty around us. Whatare we to do with friendship? So easy-bodied, piled together on floor or couch, webend, bind, brace. Herbitten lip in mid thought. Theirbaggy legged short shorts,corduroy shirt stroke. Hiscollar bone become sweat slidedew skinned in low light. Kitchen-doorwaydialogue at the party. Goddamn.Elastic imprint on the wrist.Fold of skin, secret space.Guttural […]

but i wish myself intothe titanic’s turkish baths,2 – 6 p.m.: men only hours,not despite its sinking butto de-baptize our longing;give me that high-conceptlow-effort kind of fatality:two queer bodies buriedinto drowning loungers& let’s fallinto each other’s skinbecause i can no longer standthat every love song turnsinto a confession of hunger,at least a ship wrecks its […]

Teigan Lan is a queer Chinese writer, student, and community organizer. They write personal essays for their Substack, and have published op-eds with the Toronto Star and Melanin Base Camp. They are very fond of Mitski.

Love, I amkintsugi, shards and lacquer, I repairmyself  in gold. I am a mosaic Vesuvius cannot  erase. You willexcavate memories like fragments preserved in ash. I am Michelangelo, I make stone flow into silk. Cut me away  and I become a monument.  So hide from this collapse. Love, I am Chauvet Cave, full of art. You will miss the way I bent […]

Back then, a few bodies ago, you knew how to get your dreams delivered. You would sleep in the shape of a question mark and the empty side of the bed would be the silent answer. Now the silence is broken by you answering the door late, groggy. Now dreams are strangers’ hands, with covered […]

Addison Branson (she/they) is a poet, data analyst, and anthropologist from Winston-Salem, NC. As a queer writer, they explore themes of identity, broken connection, and the disaster of human experience. When she isn’t working, Addison can often be found at a local bar enjoying a white negroni, engrossed in a book, and enthusiastically playing cards, […]

It fidgetsforever restless, migrating through meby the minute, blooming like a bruise beneath my skinfrom a fall I don’t remember taking,its tendrils ticklingas it scrapes away the subcutaneous layer—It growsin my stomach like a watermelonfrom a seed I don’t remember swallowing,my chest is hollowing, if I tapthe points of my breaststhe echo bounces back—It stretchesmy […]

i want someone to fill my mouthwith marbles—the opaque kind, with milky swirls of blue. i’ve spent so long like this—saying everything to please everybody else— that i need to start over from a mumble. i havemouthfuls of shame stopped up inside my gut, piled like sludge in a barrel, like bile waitingfor my morning […]

After Ada Limón Rain is the truest bright dead thingI’ve ever been afraid of. Rain as it beatsagainst a window, tiny little bodies,each drop a chance to catch something beforeit splatters. I live most of my lifetrying to avoid disaster. One day,in our car on the way to churchMy husband asks me what I’m thinking […]

did you know that you can reignite a fire by the tail of its smoke?sometimes i wish to be bright orange ashascending and illuminating the deep blues and wisps of grey. i could lie and say that smoke trailed into my eyesbut i cried within to the heavensasking for a flame reignited. i don’t need […]

With viscous clouds of lighthair-thin on your Vaseline lips. Pearl-lit sweat through yourravine hands. This is not half of the half that I remember:the kerosene whistle of your skin, spit collecting in the saw-toothof your mouth. Your blue-smothered eyes. Everything I remember is noteverything I wanted. Nor is it anything that I did not.There was […]

My mother asks us to be quiet, to not let words come before thoughts.And I think of women kept in cagesIn houses where they kill the birds. My mother asks us to not make trouble.She pours wax in our open mouths and it hardensI obey and my teeth leave impressions. When I try to swim, […]

To hoard –silent stare,light flickeringmouth agapeand emptyswallows withheldwithering vineimperfect harvest.Evenworm riddledthe apple sweetensand buzzes.Evenunlapped,the juice ripens.A symphonyunstruck. Serah Wolfe is a poet, painter, and writer dwelling in the American Midwest.

It turns out, if a person takes all the anti-anxiety pills at once,anxiety disappears forever.Everything disappears forever. My mother was the age I am now.I, a child. All gets crushed beneath the weight of a single fact.I don’t remember leaving the house. Don’t remember packing my clothes,my guitar, my baseball cards.Her Stephen King novels, which I’d read with jittery […]

Dakota Smith (she/her) is a poet, performance artist, and writer who received her MFA from Randolph College. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Good River Review, Imposter Lit, and The Westchester Review. She lives in New York City and is on Instagram as @likethestates. 

i want a miracle so plain,so unassuming& without drama— a bush full of leaves the sea as it is the sun swirling through the skylike the gasses its made of the miracle must be happening: steam rising from the wet woodlike ghosts leaving the body murders of crows eating the bambion the roadside two coyotes […]

It hits better whenyou predict the weather wrongly.Now is a weather for big feelings—wordless big feelings.But I’ll try to word them for you.Listen up— with your body, I mean. So I see a deep cloudy portal forming west.A sky folk braces her chariot,raging, charging into nothingness.I see a sky folk perform a southern smile.His hair laid […]

I left my jacket in the woods one day & cried when I realized  I came back to the spot a few days later & there it was, hung on a tree like a coat rack  all over it,spiders had nestedin the fabric / hiding from the cold October air  every time I lose something I feel so small  but at least the mistakes I made have kept […]

after Kaylin Haught  I asked God if it was okay to like other girls and he said absolutely not I asked Aphrodite if it was okay to like other girls and she said of course I asked God if it was okay that I take a break from going to church and he said never I asked Aphrodite if it was […]

Craig, you’re killing me. You singthat flavor we all still taste, the way you start drinking coffee black to live past middle age and there is a nuttyquality, a sweetness not sugar but somethingmore true, reminding you coffeecomes from a fruit, and you know what’s not good for us and evoke those old pick-up-truck-in-a-field parties as something like […]

When you see a bird flying. All others. Geoffrey Wessel is an American diplomat and amateur philosopher who enjoys thunderstorms and once translated the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights into 720 lines of iambic pentameter. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill and the London School of Economics. He lives […]