I was all need you were out dog licking wound & ok/ so I’m destroyer all pressure pace move right through mouth & more do you swoon over Camus or coke & cum turn home melted ponder under slither fingers fighting fodder what kind of blood am I to you with war zipping hard underneath
Read moreBLOOM by KRISTIN CHANG
I touch myself like a wound & my skin spits up its color like blood. It’s beautiful to feel darkness unattended in the body. To love the backs of our hands, to forget what will end us. I bruise the underside of my tongue
Read moreATROPA BELLADONNA by SYDNEY MCNEILL
black leather boots kick fine soil down from a cliff-side perch – disperses into an ill-coloured cloud, the way my brain feels.
Read moreBLOOM by ABBY CARON
Feminism is a really big part of who I am, so I love to incorporate that into my work by making it very much based on strong women. Art and creativity are the most important parts of my life, and I think that more emphasis on the arts is needed across the world and in […]
Read moreNOW GO AND LOVE SOME MORE by COCO WILDER
They tasted open to me. Her fingers tasted open as chopped lemons; me squeezing the juice into the cuts until she says stop, it’s okay. Fill me with you instead. And I say, awesome, I’m glad you’ve agreed. Time for me. Then all the smoke blows: I every destination of direction.
Read moreGROWTH by ABBY CARON
I’m constantly being inspired by color and nature. I love how certain colors interact with each other to create for some really interesting effects visually, and I think that color is the single biggest part in my work. If the colors don’t work, then I don’t feel that my art works at all. There’s not […]
Read moreIN THE DEAD OF SPRING by KRISTIN CHANG
A white boy holds his hand like a gun. The earth bleeds out its rivers, I fist a flower. Don’t let them say genesis. Don’t let them say born again. Show me a hunger that names itself and I’ll show you my mouth,
Read moreBETWEEN CULTURE AND AMERICA by FRANKIE CONCEPCION
My friend Phoebe is the first person I ever heard say the word ‘feminist’ in real life. “You know,” she had said, “I think the feminists really ruined it for us women.” It was the first time I had encountered the word outside a YouTube video, or a Tumblr post—my peepholes into American culture in […]
Read moreOKAY, YOU ARE ART by SAMANTHA PEREZ
We met in class. I sat next to her and rested a forearm on the desk, watching her draw a pair of eyes. She looked up. “Can I draw yours?” I wore my hair pulled back into a ponytail, a t-shirt with sleeves that went to my elbows and a bare face; Mallory had black […]
Read moreSLIGHTLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME by SARA ADAMS
FINAL SPRING by SARA ADAMS
ANXIOUS DIVA by HANNAH KUCHARZAK
Anxious Diva puts me up for ransom. I ask her why I can’t feel my body. She just wanted to smell the cake up close. Who can blame her? Herself orbitless, disappeared? Dress sagging below the knees. Miss Charity wearing a ski mask, no panties.
Read moreFALSE TEETH by VANESSA WILLOUGHBY
Even if I run out of water I can still waste light years plotting our ruin with pruning shears. We being beings who shed our skin daily Sometimes during the violet hour to dine On paint thinner and praise temporary faces.
Read moreTWENTY-FIRST by AMY LAUREN JONES
On the picnic blanket under the oak tree my father turned to me and said: “We hope you always come back here,” where the shade eases the Southern sun on our pale skin, where we sit in favor, and I felt this birthday’s finite weight: the ratio of lie to light, and the brevity of […]
Read moreREQUIEM FOR THE MASSES BY RISHIKA AGGARWAL
hair spilling / like crowfeathered blood / razor hums wiping away / ink-scared wrists and mama says / no more girl / no more woman i wake, and she is hanging by the ceiling fan / again. bloodless girl ripping/rippling apart / like still water breaking.
Read moreMALNOURISHED by JACKIE BRAJE
He says things the way spilled milk does, calcium cutting and bone dry, so I cry about it. We stand outside a Mexican diner and an Open sign’s screaming red and blue all over his face as he tells me he needs something more. My
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THE VAGABOND TAPES: Wistful
> so you didn’t get what you wanted. >> that’s okay. breathe. there is life left.
Read moreVagabond City Interviews Emily O’Neill
EMILY O’NEILL is an artist, writer, and proud Jersey girl. She tells loud stories in her inside voice because she wants to keep you close. Her work has appeared in The Best Indie Lit New England Anthology, Cutbank, The Journal, Sugar House Review, Washington Square and Whiskey Island, among many others. Her poem “de Los […]
Read moreNeyat Yohannes on “Your Sick” by Elizabeth J. Colen, Carol Guess, and Kelly Magee
In this collaborative effort, Elizabeth J. Colen (author of poetry and flash fiction collections, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011), Carol Guess (author of 15 books of poetry/prose, awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University), and Kelly Magee (author of chapbooks and short story collections, winner of the Katherine […]
Read moreART by FÁBIO MIGUEL ROQUE
I truly believe that art can shape and comment on the world we live in. I’m not a documentary photographer, but I very much appreciate this kind of work, and I think people are really sensitized with some projects. Projects can really change their minds about important issues. I’m thinking of issues with the flow […]
Read moreART by JESSICA TURETSKY
I don’t think that art plays a big enough role in society. I think that it is undervalued in the school system, as well as the professional world. The parts of life that the arts do play into are made that much more vibrant. Art is able to portray culture and bring communities together. I […]
Read moreREMEMBER THE FUN WE HAD WHEN YOU POISONED ME by EMILY O’NEILL
today my coworker Brian touches me without my permission & I imagine rending his head from his body with my bare hands / I can blame the impulse on a customer / Joe always asks what scary thing I’ve done to myself today / I always answer in movie titles // in The Exorcism of […]
Read moreI WILL DIE CHAINED TO AN ESPRESSO MACHINE by EMILY O’NEILL
I’m lying in bed playing dead lizard because it’s all dry where rain should happen & cinder where we didn’t put ourselves out. That’s the legacy. We forgot to inconvenience ourselves. Don’t know
Read moreWARP by RACHANA HEGDE
Teacher asks me to speak, asks me to sigh, asks me to be dramatic & shy (please?). Nobody ever says please. In my mind a crane is shifting and juddering to a halt. I’m the girl sprawled breathless, drawing myself nude.
Read moreEXORCISM by RACHANA HEGDE
Mama binds my wounds slipshod, drippy-wet, I watch crow overbalancing, crow flailing, crow falling off the wires. In the dining room, Papa rubs at the sangria stains. The guests calcify under my gaze & I trip, dissonant
Read moreSOFABED by CAITLIN BAIRD
HAMPTON STREET, 12:00 AM (FIGURE IN A MIRROR IN TWO PARTS) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT
after Jeremy Radin the unfading birthmark / the right breast, tender cicatrice & ache / the organs who refuse motherhood / the knees, swollen like heavy balloons / the hips, purposeless gates / the thighs, two fumbling giants / the hands, deserts without oasis or mirage / the crescented knuckle that sewed itself / the […]
Read moreSOUTH WILLOW STREET, 7:11PM (BODY) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT
i didn’t know my stomach would become a wallet for my fingers to pickpocket
Read moreHAMPTON STREET, 5:21 PM (SELF-PORTRAIT AS SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT
i built a glass box with a tornado inside.
Read moreHORIZON by JAYY DODD
You will find roads familiar and vacant, daylight obscured by furrowing sky, some congested covering will billow from an apocalyptic breeze. Roadside civilizations will trace piecemeal monuments to all you knew as home. You’ll be passenger to your flesh, and it will guide you, traverse
Read moreSPRING DESIDERATUM by ATREYEE GUPTA
Every day the world chooses a darker turn, a crueler path. Apathy seems the best course against this indecipherable savagery, this unspeakable calamity. Like a turtle, I want to crawl within my shell and disappear. So I take myself to the mountains in springtime where its verdurous raiments can soothe my rattled nerves. Here the […]
Read moreA WAKE by CASEY CLAGUE
Baby duck imprints a mother on the first thing he sees, would stream through a lake with a goose, bear, human single dad. Glazed-eye after- noon, red tide. Last seen
Read moreART by MAGGIE CHIANG
THE VAGABOND TAPES: calm
> so you had a long and hard day at work. >> and you want to sit back. >>> rewind. >>>> and relax.
Read moreBethany Mary on “Manic Depressive Dream Girl” by Naadeyah Haseeb
Trigger warning: bipolar, theme of suicide “Hypothesis: I will not go crazy because I am not truly insane. Just a spectacular fuck up,” is the bitterly hopeful premise of Naadeyah Haseeb’s Manic Depressive Dream Girl. This unconventional chapbook, in which the boy and girl are alternately comfortable and wild, explores the depth a relationship can […]
Read moreTHE VAGABOND TAPES: last summer
> you’re aching. >> let it breathe. >>> let it wail. >>>> let it out.
Read moreLesley LeRoux on “Howling at the Moon” by Darshana Suresh
“How much can you tell me about love?” asks the bird in Darshana Suresh’s opening poem, “Birds on a Power Line,” from Howling at the Moon (Platypus Press). “Enough to fill my breakfast bowl,” answers the other. In her debut poetry collection, 19-year-old Suresh has more than enough to share about love, loss and survival […]
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THE VAGABOND TAPES: Aching
> you’re aching. >> let it breathe. >>> let it wail. >>>> let it out.
Read moreMOOD: DARK
FEATURED ARTIST: Niki Gaines
ABOUT NIKI Niki Gaines is an outgoing, food and craft beer enthusiast who thoroughly enjoys adventure, traveling the world, and exploring new cultures. Enamored with photography, Niki finds herself wrapped in the abstract mind of the darkroom passionately engaged with experimental processes. Her work involves issues around construction of identity and the loss of such. Niki recently […]
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WHEN I FIRST WENT INTO THE OCEAN I | Jasmine Sierra
felt like a magic woman, magic mouth of the Pacific calling to me ’til she could kiss me on my feet. Asked me how I gone so long without lettin’ these feet come to cozy up with the swelling of the shoreline and I said too long ’cause I almost
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ART | Vanya Truong
INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST LUCIA PASQUALE: What are you currently reading? VANYA TRUONG: I am currently reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s very strange and slightly haunting. I’m also re-reading Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre because I was feeling odd about myself again. Both books are very emotionally overpowering for me, so I […]
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MOTION SICKNESS | Torii Johnson
the politics of getting noticed in New York straddle borders and sit next to me on park benches. I keep headphones on so they won’t touch me with their Hey what’s your name but that man is still beating one off on a park bench. there are still parts of me that want to be […]
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VENUS FADING FROM THE SKY | N. L. Shompole
1 I take flight at dusk, pink and indigo sky stretching each way into infinity. Blue wind over my skin I think of how the world came to be. In a dream last night I was a hummingbird in migration. A sudden storm and I was in descent, torn from the sky.
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THE ANATOMY OF A PIXIE GIRL DROWNING | Martina Dominique Dansereau
You have always loved the anatomy of a pixie girl drowning; from my salt- covered lips to the weeds in my lungs, you worshipped me as a false god. When we first met, the water was only just beginning to lap at the shores of my heart. I was thirteen; my eyes were still lit […]
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SHARK + GIRAFFE | Susannah Betts
DEGREES / OF / SEPARATION | Torii Johnson
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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GIRL, INTERRUPTED | Martina Dominique Dansereau
Girl with mouth of river bled dry. Girl whose first blood comes from choking back words too big for her mouth. Girl with tightrope wrists and knife handles in her thighs. Girl like a wrecked car, rusted iron smile. Girl who swallows a sparrow heart and spits out the feathers. Girl and her razor-rimmed eyes. […]
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SAVE BLACK BODIES | aung.robo
DARK BEAUTY | Andiswa Onke Maqutu
“You are too black.” “I’m sorry.” The make-up artist filed through a brown palette of bottles of foundation in annoyed haste. Her purple tinted nails clawed at them and they clamoured over each other in protest. “I have all the colours here; toast, cappuccino, caramel, cocoa, mocha… even mahogany. But I don’t have your colour, […]
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VAGABOND CITY 