My Own Private Idaho: Tuesday night at the New Beverly Cinema. Five-dollar double feature, don’t remember the second one. Gummy seats, sticky floor and nobody there but us (and the) creeps. You, in love with the girl who stood you up: The thrift shop dress and vintage nickname. Me, last minute sub, extra ticket— Footwork […]
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The West Oakland train stop; defunct and tagged standing sentry between a collapsed overpass and a neighborhood gone to shit. You hopped the chain-link easily and breezed across the hill and dale of broken concrete, the stubborn flora crowding up and in between; moving earth like tiny fault lines, smashing plates together, splicing ground to […]
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The post-Halloween wind comes in, bearing its chill and a raspy cigarette-torn voice. I feel its brush against the branches of our uselessly thin trees, hear its rough attempt at a tune. It has been years now since your death and you have remained silent. Only my own melodramatic mind can believe this voice is […]
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Trigger warning: child sexual abuse, homophobia Age 12: Their parents give them a promise ring inscribed with “True Love Waits,” to be worn on the ring finger until replaced by a marriage band. They wear it daily for a couple of years before forgetting about it in the back of a drawer only to find it […]
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The pink floor lamp was flickering behind my ear, the dirt was making terrains for summer ants on the plastic strips that we got from Ikea to cover the life-size window behind your couch, also from Ikea. There were stains of old, dried acrylics visible on various parts of your beat up couch from the […]
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This is a story Hector told about someone he went to boot camp with: there was a guy Hector went to boot camp with who was an idiot. One time when they were lining up for inspection, this guy got yelled at because he had put his pants on backwards. He zipped them up and […]
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Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, writing, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. Allen studied acting in the Columbia Pictures Talent Program in Los Angeles and digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and […]
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“I’m feeling apocalyptic,” I tell them. They know this word to mean the apocalypse. The end of us all. But they don’t know what I mean when I say I feel apocalyptic. It’s a mood, a feeling, a place I go when I try to imagine tomorrow and am not sure it will come. When I try […]
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Dear David, To begin, I want to say that I forgive you. I forgive you for not calling. I harbor no resentment that the only tangible remuneration I got for sucking on your cock was a slightly salty aftertaste and waves of queasiness for the next few hours. In fact…and, I know this is going […]
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PART ONE I watch the hand holding a gun of needles against the flesh of my arm, the points racing across my skin, depositing ink below my epidermis. The omnipresent buzzing is the sound of anticipation, all-encompassing like the noise is originating inside my skull itself. Tattoos are, fundamentally, a religious experience for me. To […]
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I close my eyes and I see grapes. I lay my hands at my sides and my fingers come together as if to pinch at invisible stems. I count the bunches as I fall asleep… It is cold morning. I plod down rows that tumble over landscapes for miles and miles and miles. I look […]
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TW for rape I was stuck in traffic on Route 16 when the interview came on the radio. Rachel Dissell, a newspaper reporter in Cleveland, described her investigation of Ohio’s failure to analyze DNA evidence collected from the bodies of women who’d been raped. Close to four thousand rape kits sat on shelves in police […]
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In between the shatter world headaches and brain splinters and mildew and dry heat on Sundays and the gum-slathered concrete on third street and everything I hated I felt like I couldn’t find anything but picked apart bones and littered daffodils. I was born into the city the same year the Mars Polar Lander landed. […]
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“I feel like the story needs to mention what you did to end up in there. I mean, you went to prison so you obviously did something. If you don’t say what it was, it’s going to be a distraction for your readers.” For a long moment, you consider diving across the table and strangling […]
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We met by chance, along the dry riverbed, one long-shadowed, mosquito-muggy afternoon. The dusty bed coated my shoes as I kicked over logs and shale looking for fossils. I came to the river for everything I knew it had been, and to bury my own remnants there. I came upon her poking a dead bird […]
Read moreOur mother named you after a lighthouse keeper from a book she read once and I always wondered, when she told me that, if she thought you would be her salvation because it certainly seemed that way with how she spent those hours secluded in her room talking to you on the phone while I […]
Read moreObsession is something that happens to people who aren’t so together. You have a full time job. Forty hours, on the nose. A four-door sedan—moderate, comfortable. You sit in rush hour for forty minutes, both ways, every day. You eat four meals, usually. Your life is full of four. This. That. You aren’t obsessed. You […]
Read moreMom always talked about the importance of ancestry. She’d say that most Black people don’t know their history. She’d sit me down, and go over a list of books: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, From Slavery to Freedom, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Things Fall Apart, Black Boy, and Black […]
Read moreYou and Leroy are in the Moon’s parking lot. Leroy always says that if you go between the hours of 1 and 3 am, you won’t have to deal with the police department. Leroy was never wrong. The Moon is the highest point in St. Charles County. It is a 75-foot tall pile of grey […]
Read moreWe are on the I-37 halfway between Austin and South Padre Island, Texas. We started our trip late today, the pink sky already changing to a deep orange on our rearview mirror. It’s my favorite time. When my husband and I drive together to Savannah, Nashville or the closest Texas town, we reach a point […]
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I wasn’t even part of this — but it’s spread into everything like motor oil — stays around — I wonder what decides critical — sticky and forcefully there — I wonder who decides who gets a house — I want to know how much money they lost — to lose even more — what […]
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I. The dash, scattered with photographs of the girls you had kissed, and me, sitting in the passenger seat, placing my cheeks on the chilly tempered glass, never wishing that one of those pictures might be of me. Your summer breath – popcorn hulls, jalapeño juice, tobacco leaves – all so close to my mouth, […]
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Imagine the struggle for interracial love as a series of group discussions, nothing more. Nobody shrieks and flies for the throat. Plates, unbroken. Ground rules. “Safe” space. Imagine that the interpersonal work against racism is at a round table, in a concert hall, within a forum. Nothing more. Curated. Conducted. Logged. To my mother, Angelina […]
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Palm trees and military barracks fade white from the sun, the way it was before they got here and plucked all the butterflies, like candles from cake, and rust red water poured into rivers mixing red dirt with ocean, forming clay, the kind I painted and sold on the sides of desert freeways. 1964. The […]
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My coworker asks me what I’m doing with my life, as if this is a question I know the answer to instead of one I ask myself every day. She also asks me why I don’t use my low reserves of energy to find a boyfriend. Through the haze of depression and chilling dreams, I […]
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What does it feel like to feel? It feels like the thoughts of every living person are inside of you, like they are thumping against the side of your head and they are reflecting off of your eyeballs like they are mirror images of yourself, even when they are not you. Does it feel like […]
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the beat of your heart– one. two. three. four. the gleam of your sweat– heat. shimmer. hips. quiver. the almond of your eyes– green. kind. honey. mine. the space behind your ribs– ache. flood. furnace. blood. the palm of your hand– red. flower. touch. devour. the bend of your thumb– square. raw. hook. trace. the soft […]
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Pregnancy was everywhere. That’s what happens after having really good unprotected sex. I bragged about it to my best friend: about how my lover and I had been spontaneous and placed our bets on the pull-out method, how I’d broken my rule of saying his name. Hundreds of miles away and with her face bright […]
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Editor’s note – trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence I. buckle-punctuated tenderness, steaming vodka lips press to my neck / the church spire spears swollen dawn, i cry / make you drive me home, sneak inside before my mother stirs / thank you for not making me ask twice. II. your mouth melts gold […]
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smoke the bowl. it’ll put you to sleep. you and your best friend smoke out the window in the middle of the night and you both dream that the room is on fire. you’ve started having dreams that he’s kidnapping you. they stick in the back of your head even when you’re saying i love […]
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Few things give me more anxiety than going to the dentist. The moment I walk into the office, with the high-pitched whirrs of the drill piercing my ears, my primal instincts kick in to high gear, and I have to stop myself from bolting out the door. Even as I write this, I feel a […]
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The first man to name me “goddess” was twenty-one and drunk on gin. Breath heavy with lust and booze, he told me that most nights he carved poems into the walls trying to write me alive in the room with him, so when the light hit the scrapes just right, he could catch his breath […]
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Sometimes I swear there’s a rock in my stomach. It shakes a little when I lie on my back at night, staring up at the starburst-textured cement ceiling of my bedroom. The rock is always there, but there’s something about the time I take to fall asleep that makes it want to be known, like […]
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The first girl I ever kissed had a mouthful of luring words and veins full of Percocet. I wore the potent perfume of pineapple vodka on my breath and wilted forward into her lap, all curled up at the edges like a water-logged book. We were perched on the end of a leather couch in […]
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Alcoholic Anonymous’ Thirteen-Step Guide on How Your Addiction Destroyed Her Life: {for best results, follow the curve of the theory. trace it to the bottom of its backbone so you can find how best to hollow out her spine.} i. get a young woman. be her father. tell her she’s your sun. your stars. tell […]
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It was a knowing. A Gnostic phenomenon. I had seen the place before, a place that stood quietly at the edges of a town. It was the type of place one intended to visit, but intentions are not actualities. There were around it wheat fields to one side, and large quiet looms on the other. […]
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1. I don’t want to be begged. I am turned on by a steady affection, an unwavering rationality. I want you to do my taxes please memorize my social security number darling. 2. Be careful be careful be careful I am sharp in unexpected places I will remember your mother’s name and kiss your earlobe […]
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I’ll be at a party, clutching a plastic cup of something that probably doesn’t deserve to be called beer and making the motions of small talk but actually just shouting to be heard over the loud music. A tall econ major and I will be talking about something utterly banal, maybe an observation about the […]
Read moreReunion with a Friend Lost for 38 Years Meet me at the pub’s fire pit. I have a wife and you do too. I consider this a test. Who picks up the tab?
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VAGABOND CITY 