Swimming in between stubborn kindergarten gums, my mouth is full of blood. We pull up to that blue house while the kitchen curtain is on fire.
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FOR THE AVERAGE MELIPHONA BEE | Inara Lalani
I speak the language of a vanilla-flavoured day. Just beige pastels, and an ordinary tint of a café-au-lait. I have spent a lifetime crawling over a blanket of shells, just to coat my bones in the achromatic pain of synonymity so that my crescendo of affliction remains unheard,
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AN AQUARIUM FOR THE DEAD| Inara Lalani
I have this theory, That for six days, I could maybe keep a goldfish alive long enough so that I could see you again. On day one, I would watch the salesman pull it out from its home, and tuck it into a bag filled with more air than water.
Read moreISSUE 6: NOTES FROM OUR EDITORS
FROM: Rachel Charlene Lewis [Editor] The writers in this issue are overwhelmingly not straight, not white, not male, not established; the writers in this issue are women, they are queer, they are young, they are of color; this, in itself, to me, is magic.
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Fluid | Sarah Pinkerton
I am valued only in triptych, in tandem with someone and the services I can provide. Rolling out like the underfoot mat I so often am, belly up or arse in the air, I aim to be agreeable and end up flat on my back, fucked like a newlywed. Not enjoying it,
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13 POEMS FOR SOULS HOUSED BY BODIES I HAVE COLLIDED WITH | Chantal Paloma
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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the last time i tried to kill myself and was too ashamed to tell my therapist | Abigail Staub
Editor’s note: trigger warnings for sexual assault, suicide a college student asked me if it was true that i’d fuck him for booze; he said he knew how i liked it,
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Untitled Digital Poetry | Chantal Paloma
If You’re Afraid | Sage Kubis
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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2 poems| J.L. Harlow
Drifting Away Numb, and I cannot use this hidden shade of blue, Evening and the noise is everything but music, Mother is screaming, and I do not live for the bible, Mother is screaming, because I do not live for the bible,
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Blackness: A poem and identity in parts | Elizabeth Mudenyo
I. I used to deny it Pretend I didn’t see it And now I devour every bit of blackness I lick my fingers clean
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2 Photographs | Natalie Geisel
Tongue-Tied | Krista Varela
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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Digital Art & Photography | Molly Shanahan
Honey & Asking For It| Meggie Royer
Editor’s note: I’ve decided to group these two poems because they respond well to each other. Be aware that there seems to be a theme of sexual assault/abuse. Honey Honey let us take you home tonight so we can rob you of your arms and then put them on again backwards so you’ll always remember […]
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She Has Found Religion At The Gym | Marnie Bullock Dresser
The girl next to me strains as though she’s on a quest, not an elliptical. Constant sweat, an occasional groan. She keeps murmuring, “Oh God. Oh God.”
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Clementine | Laura Mayron
“We’re going to be man slayers,” you told me, fox eyes glimmering. We were nine, on the playground. I knew you would be, with your sharp, fast grin and trickster ways. Already you were revolutionary. You moved through the woods like a sprite daring and limber among the sweet-smelling eucalyptus as we searched for fairies […]
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2 poems | Johannes Punkt
Inner Thighs sext: I hesitate to use the word beautifully to describe the way you open yourself like a coral-reef in bloom to me, but I’m prismatic too; I fuck you like an oil spill.
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Facets | Saniya Walawalkar
I Am Not A Cure | Abigail Staub
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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Sex Scene | Kelsi Villarreal
While the show swells forward through its scenes— the windfall of sex, and the sudden twist ending where all good fortune is reversed—
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The Stone Inside | Molly Robinson
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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Eden | Grayson Herrgott
Sometimes I sit and stare at the coils of the bunk above me tracing their weaving pattern as if they were some sort of pathetic man-made constellation. And I think of all the ridiculous ways I compare you to others.
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What I Imagine You Taste Like in Bed | Lora Mathis
Like all of your ex-girlfriends swirled into one The Hippie becoming the Shaking Limbed The Almost But It Never Happened becoming the Fantasy Like your mother offering you a tangerine
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Through The Eyes | Saniya Walawalkar
For Girls and Grief | Abigail Staub
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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Wondering | J.C.
My first crush was in love with Patrick Dempsey. So I used to watch Grey’s Anatomy so I’d have something to talk to her about.
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An Almost Woman | Emily Nash
There are thousands of poems by women who were misunderstood with fears of either becoming an old maid, or of marriage.
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that’s why they call her the trauma queen | Jasmine Lomax
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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Eat Me: Photography | Molly Shanahan
Elegie of a Diaspora | Ally Ang
Love, unfold yourself like a flower unto spring. Let the sun cradle you when you ache for your mother’s arms. Do not weep when you trace your bloodlines but find only an empty picture frame hanging in your grandmother’s house.
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It must have got lost in the mail | Susannah Betts
The sweatshirt still smells musty at the third wash and my thong still in the corner of the laundromat floor where I left it. Does spandex decompose? I didn’t like the look of someone else’s blue detergent on my red so I couldn’t own the thong after I saw it. Thongs don’t get adopted though […]
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—moLt ShEd | Rebecca Y. Lee
Most mornings, I wake and imagine myself lizard— nails running over rust-gray puckerings, peeling centuries blood into dust when the old skin wears too ancient I never know if I’ll emerge— sloughed-off history showing soft new smooth, breathing fresh or when my mask will slip—reveal monster underneath: past deeds etched deep within each canyon crinkle If I […]
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3 Poems | Andrew Wetmore
Cancer We laid on our backs and pulled shapes from the sky like reading the letters out of porno magazines. You had all your vaccinations and went to Sunday school every Sunday. You memorized your catechism and realized you were witnessing an execution When I walk down the street widows throw signs warding against the […]
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The Place Under The Pastoral Skies | Brian Michael Barbeito
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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Some Day Soon | Donal Mahoney
Dexter Dalrymple had no idea why anyone would want to interview him. Who would care at this point what he’d have to say. Maybe his family and a few old friends, in deference to his age and wealth, hoping to find themselves in his will some day soon. But he had agreed to this interview […]
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9 things to know before you crawl into my bed | Lily Cigale
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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Annual Well Woman Visit | Victoria Massie
I. My arms stretch to the heavens pre-destination lengthy torso stunted by chicken legs The nurse begged me stand tall; wall and back kissing; head and neck reconnecting inward like best-friend secrets. “Five and three quarters” It takes women in my family incessant earth-moon rotations for them to fall down permanently in love with the […]
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3 Poems | Kelsey Schmidt
conversely she was my saturday night my bathroom stall drug the cigarettes butts on my back porch. you are my sunday morning my lipstick stained coffee mug bleary-eyed kisses that taste like toothpaste left, right, you left again. i lost all desire to be your/china/doll your sixAM/hotelroom/smoke little bitch, don’t call me ring/voicemail/ring/hangup rinse, repeat. effloresce i am full […]
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3 Poems | Venus Crow
Home. Come home my love to gentle rains, where fire hearts breathe you in. walk among the feathered pines with me at your side. Be blessed by love’s tender touch swim with lost memories of days swiftly flown and scattered upon the breeze. We miss the sanctified song of your soul exalted among mere mortals. […]
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Majid | Maj al-Yasa
Majid from your wine-stained lips meem alif jiim daal م-ا-ج-د you print the letters on my palm and close my fist around the syllables. ت-ح-ب-ن-ش you love me like the Prophet –salaam– loved Fatima –beloved– and I love you as a brother. ت-ض-ح-ك you laugh. be my wife. و-ق-ف habibi, I […]
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Maribel and the Feet that Itched | Daniella De Jesús
Maribel used to be a disco dancer, studio 54-ing it up on a Monday night. Today she stirs a Donna Summer song into a boiling pot on the stove. And a heart breaks every day she doesn’t dance. The swirling sweet potatoes remind her of herself. She imagines for a minute what her life could’ve […]
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2 Poems | Patricia P.
Futile Morbidity I imagine my funeral to have a punch bowl of regrets and scarcity of people the place would be drab, not much different than my own life my mother would burst into tears every second or so and my sister would be handing out tissues that would end up unused I hope the […]
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California | Lily Cigale
california did you forget scratching off your skin on the floor of your parents’ shower, home from a chilly vacation with a warm girl? a text at three am: “I’ve peeled all my skin off do you still love me? can you still love a mess of bloody muscle, viscous trails, teeth, teeth, teeth?? things […]
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Named | Hea-Ream Lee
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 […]
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Out of An Ant Hill | R.K. Gold
Out of ant hill, rolling over itself in unison with the white grains of sand was a green caterpillar. I’ve seen the desperate search for a home before. Reflecting off its eyes and down its cheeks hoping its tears will dampen the sand enough for a child to build him a castle. Only to have […]
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5 Poems | Šejla Srna
Salesclerk i feel like i am fading away everything irritates me the sound of my space bar at 2 am is my worst enemy right now and the fact that this isn’t a poem but i’m still making it look like one is making me sick to my fucking stomach i just drank a can […]
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“The First Day of Spring” by Mike Power
It was a sunny day, the kind that always reminded Joe of childhood. He’d been thinking about his younger days quite a bit since his mother died. She’d been his last direct connection to that fading part of his life. He would never be sure again if his memories of that time were accurate, now […]
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“Stay in the T’s” by David Michael Joseph
It was a warm, Friday afternoon and my frat brother from Orlando was staying in the new dorms at Temple during his internship. His name was Mark: A tall, slender brown skinned Jamaican originally from North Jersey but now doing time in the Sunshine state. I had promised to hang out with him and it […]
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“Something Died” by Dan Morey
There was an awful stink in Jerry Dairy’s trailer. A stink like something died. Actually, Mary Dairy said that a dead thing in the trailer was entirely possible. She said that Sid the vicious guinea pig had disappeared a week ago and that now he was probably decomposing under the furniture somewhere. We emptied a can of […]
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VAGABOND CITY 