vagabondcitypoetry

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 […]

Hair kept unkempt to flow in the       wind. Clouds reign over the sea by this road. Tires sear the pavement       with our passion so hard we leaveblue embers behind. Ankles on       dashboards, sunglasses in rainbow.Skin on skin, the tenderness of a       hand, of a laugh. Peach fuzz & smiles.The horizon: blushing red like a       first kiss, ensnaring our eyes someplace warmer […]

on our last day of happiness she drove me to the Tennessee borderfists clenched on the wheel through the crowded interstate turnsbefore tumbling into the never-far-away fringes of nowhere, forestbreaking a fever in the mid-afternoon sun. she parks illegally, tugs down her sunglasses, and we wind into the humid heavyjade and emerald shadows. it’s taking too […]

after Eleanor Wikstrom & while writing this, mā,      i am still learning how your absencebites my body bare under      yellowed street lamps,carves tragedy or myth or memory      out of a girl’s womb. mā, is this thedistance between girl & womanhood? tonight, against the cold-     faced concrete, i sketch the city skyline, traceevery path we took down the alleys. […]

flowers froth-blooming:carmine and daffodil, orchid and violetgreen glimmering alien iridescenceautumn winding throughthe karmic wheel, edifice of lifestraddling life, the earthbleeding earth, briefcracking clouds, a secondlate blooming still alivelate but not too late. nourishing the bones of my quiet aether behindthe ginkgo tree, kicking crabapples asidejoy, resurrection, andfaeries made from pegs withclear gray eyesthe children of […]

We hurt people that love usLove people that hurt usWe say we want to date our best friendAnd end up dating someone we are afraid our friends will hateI think I can collapse everything to rules and principlesI live in a world of impressions and outlinesEveryone is a representation of their identitiesWhen I overhear conversations […]

after Ilya Kaminsky Gabrielle Bonifacio is a wistful Media Studies graduate with a minor in German and playlist-making. She writes in the hope of liberation and safety for all peoples, from Palestine to the Philippines. Her work has most recently appeared in thewildnessjournal. 

Last week, I couldn’t afford therapy,so I bought flowers instead.Ranunculi and roses, fern and blazing star.A modest bouquet of beauty,beholden only to the breeze between.Unlike me—modernity’s stupid bride.Wringing my dread, counting my debt.It’s endless, endless. Dial a friend,thread our lament. We pledge allegiance todespair, we drown in ocean breath.On a walk toward nowhere, my mom […]

In plastic chairs over fake grassconvenience store sangriapoured over icecheers to summer and your newjob I’ll miss you in the officemiss walking home with you toour respective homeslaughing next you’re shoutingat the man above in hisapartment who yelled downthat he didn’t like ushe was drunkyour laugh you sawthe ridiculousness in everythingand when the police cameyou […]

after Daniel Mallory Ortberg “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation” and here i amstaring at the crease in my elbow like i used to stare at hisand wondering what […]

A man of God told me once that self-mythologizing is the greatest sin. He asked me what I prayed for and I could not answer,  from my paper mouth. It became a fig tree, blossoming, rooting me in depth and height distractions. The fig tree was God but the tree  was me but the tree […]

I can’t remember how long it’s beensince I’ve sung a whole song, painted a whole picture, written a poem wholeenough to make me love who I am & all the while, my throat is fullof broken notes                       small blue-winged swallows. They stab at flesh […]

How could the moon have been likenedto cheese—wedge?—hardly appropriate.Possessing the delicacy of an orphanedeyelash, a demure sun-inspired stature,the moon is perfectly placed, not forced. Why was that easier to write than the title? It’s not that I’m bored of Ode to the Moonbut why would I read it when I can readOde to his Five […]