Tell us about yourself. Where you are from? Hi! I’m Karen Thom. I’m Canadian and currently live on the gorgeous southern west coast of British Columbia, Canada. I’m reminded daily by my picturesque surroundings (and the news) how truly fortunate I am. What are your passions and hobbies? My first passion is my family and […]
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Purple and sun-worn, supple and tired, you hold me on the couch in my parents’ living room. Where I cry into the space between your breasts and mine. Half-asleep, I pat your chest to shape a pillow. You belly laugh yellow into the overcast. We drive across the midwest, eat steaks marked by signs that […]
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where she sits on the front steps of the nyc townhouse i will own someday and spouts nonsense, says do your science homework, sweetie. says what matters more, what you say to yourself when you lose or what you say to yourself when you win? repeats c’est la vie. c’estlaviec’estlaviec’estlavie until my ears bleed so […]
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You told me you had your first kiss at Papa Chinos by the bushes I was awestruck that a Papa Chinos exists where they have bushes I wonder what kind of a neighbourhood you grew up in Was it a brownstone one, with houses lined one after the other or was it a scene […]
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my mother stands in my driveway holding two grocery bags like twin babies. i crush my cigarette under my foot and say mom, let me carry those for you. i tell her i’ll stop smoking when i’m pregnant and she says i already am my own baby. what i want more is to be my own […]
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i watch as my grandmother, with bordeaux painted arms, listens as my grandfather tells her about the routine details of their shared household: a squirrel that keeps trying to get into the birdfeeder, a new can of pam cooking spray has been added to the pantry, a leak in the roof their son came over […]
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My body is my home, but I shuttered it awhile back, and I’ve hovered nearby like a tangled kite, a drunken bird. Now I look through the windows, knock on panes, trace ledges. My hands follow mossy walls. I see how the roof points to the sky, and I want to live in there again, […]
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Coming back always makes me aware of my space: the pale islands making up an archipelago on my legs, the dark trees encompassing many forests on my arms, the open caverns dusting my face; and dividing me from the continent I call Home— a land mass formed from centuries of tradition but nursing weeds of […]
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Of all my inheritances my father’s appetite pulls heaviest the translucent ache licks my joints sweet a mouth without a mouth begging not for fullness but to be rid of absence a man who praises water’s return to shore transforms my […]
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VAGABOND CITY 