She lies back on the bed while he watches the snow outside settling softly like the skin in the curve of her back. With the curtains and his attention drawn back inside, the soft machine of his body reminds her of the streets after the plow comes through. She sighs and thinks a mouth is […]
Read more
After Brad Paisley, “Ticks” Every atmosphere you bottle to your lips was the other half of an idea. Let’s get out of drive, find a moonlight, kiss a path I used to […]
Read more
molten time // or perhaps memories, wet with windings and wanderings, wondering and the wariness and weariness the waxed (and waned) songs the many psalms sung and hung from expectant arms beings of ground pulled from homes soused with the whispers of living ghosts i came to give offerings at the place where trees come […]
Read more
i’m from the overlap on the clock where wild dogs and roosters crossfire. the ambiguity of stars or satellites is where i wash my hair. ankles crossed, i forget that it is rude to forget about the margin between my knees. i wore jeans to avoid the reminder from men. still, he considered a handful […]
Read more
I would bang the egg of my forehead against bathroom walls Sunday mornings. ✝ My parents would drop me at Amy’s then over coffee cake and orange juice they’d whisper “We sure do love her, but—” I had a dream last night Amy. We were holding hands walking by the side of Route 55 […]
Read more
here are the mountains— even though Ma said that the highest mountain we have in this wretched place is a hill— that I awed at from Pa’s shoulders, resting on hollow bones and shaky foundations. […]
Read more
In this treatment, I am Cameron Frye and my old man, that’s me too, I am the interminable clang against my skull, making a charmed life a nightmare, making an exquisite home a hellhole. I am trying to evade consequences of freedom. It is so dirty and so frightening, I recoil. Freedom dings and puts […]
Read more
For a time, I forgot the skin of white pines, chapped from Maine winters, their sap seeping through the bark. I forgot, by loving the dogs of Guanaja that barked from the docks of stilt homes as I passed, parting the water in a dinghy. By loving snow crowding a spit in Alaska, the stones […]
Read more
I count the days that pass into dusk, each one making me a victor of small favors and ticked-off things. This sleepless city won’t hold a stranger. Have I just entered the fresh middle time of my life or simply boarded a one-way off-peak midnight express? At times, I see my face stuck on every […]
Read more
(title inspired by “Blue Light” by Mitski) i was never born to be a dull / kitchen knife / i was born to be a sharp knife / that slices thru / whatever i damn well please / to slice hearts open / & call myself a heart breaker Vanessa Maki is a queer […]
Read more
“They told us we could chase any dream And then we died in our sleep” – Sadistik Somewhere in a dark room I tuck my face into the seams of my torn shoes; The world is a body of two hundred miens: Each one is a metaphor for foisted entropy- Spectrums of mirages in the […]
Read more
we drove to the hardware store before we went bowling. You had to buy screws. You wanted to install a shelf. I make due without shelving, cluttering rocks with spice jars, souvenirs, old cards. maybe a shelf is a good idea, maybe it’s salvation. Instead, I go to the bakery and eat a Long John […]
Read more
it starts in America, this year a shift has occurred I see some Black Americans embracing African cultures, Yoruba culture in particular some use it for aesthetics, spell “Orisa” as “Orisha” for the first time ever I don’t say I’m a Black American. I walk up to a priestess and tell her I’m actually Yoruba. […]
Read more
i eat chocolate chips for dinner the first night i notice my clock’s stopped working and it could be a coincidence but i don’t think it is. the first night the clock stops working is the first one that i don’t have the energy to brush my teeth or set an alarm. i write a […]
Read more
She tells me how in Russian, Nesting dolls are like onions, layers unraveled To reveal more layers Slowly Slowly Her mother whips the shaft of a cane on the dance studio, Splintering […]
Read more
I wrote about the assault a year after it happened once, converted reality into a short fiction piece for a class in college & a week later, my professor, in her critique, told me that the way I’d described the act was not plausible, that it could not occur in the manner in which I […]
Read more
When I’m with you I feel clean mother-made-your-room-clean I am a 50’s diner clean I want to throw everything out my window the bed, my speakers, books, high def televisions, to choke on the empty with you naked and crosslegged […]
Read more
have you ever noticed that the moment before we kiss is made up of the tension before a riot? air filled with both nothingness and hope molotov lips hot and unholy and burning for attention; together we make a lit match– a real fuckin faggot– together, we burn western civilization to the ground // i […]
Read more
long dark body wave hidden under regal mythical blood + sex /// i am a love child of punky teenage dragons + fucking serious art over the moon i wait besting key rings between knuckles / obsessive fantasy gibbous / cackling blonde wigs curled like a weapon cautiously interrupted by a charming romance […]
Read more
i got called a “sexual vampire” once and i think he meant it as a compliment. he doesn’t know i am the worst kind of vampire the real kind, the bone kind, the steely fanged kind, doesn’t know i have power crackling from the tips of my fingers, doesn’t know i peel my skin off each night […]
Read more
It’s a chain link all the times I told myself to dig in and forced a simpler phrase my muscles are sore and stringent and you ask me what the hell this means it’s a system of grabs and takes eventually you learn to move in tune to smaller steps. A night falls on you like […]
Read more
In the winter with buried fists and breath held the bodies seek one another as the ice cracks open sidewalk and skull and the night stretches on past morning flesh shivers itself full. bones drawing close in the endless dark spaces warding off the chill and smoke drifts in and out of mouths a flush […]
Read more
we name every year the worst year. resolves into view an unhappy portrait: the youth in the chair still, unsmiling. brights of nursery greyed with time. was there ever happiness here? I just think of cicadas, in summer. The worst year, maybe, but: the only one they’ve got. and so they rise like lazarus into […]
Read more
the shape of a sea is a shipcarrying bodies of frightened boysto where they can kiss boys without having to run into obituary posters on Lagos walls.the shape of hopeis a wooden cabin of the shipwith a windowthat reminds the boys of stories their lovers told themabout boys who wear their skin like it’s the […]
Read more
you undo me::braids and sanity cord wrap around your fists and with the snap of your fingers i am good girl::grandma fills the basin with plants uprooted from the backyard, and although i itch, she reminds me that i am home::it seems easy for you to take the galaxy on my shoulders and make it […]
Read more
isn’t glue / that doesn’t mean I didn’t sit in his car and wonder what it would be like to love calmly / man-made chemicals burn tongues / he leaned over and licked my lips / saliva can kill Sam Frost lives in Los Angeles and spends most of her time binge drinking green […]
Read more
Makeup makes the lie and I’m afraid of your bleach my legs/the trees open. To motivate myself I dream Kim Novak white lights in the clouds the self-control suicide note. Memory is a construct and you make it complacent say I’ll fall off the high dive break my […]
Read more
you point your tongue at my flaws twelve glass girls slide off a shelf in my chest one for each year| I’ve committed your voice to my mind’s breath I think too much of myself & not enough of family you say loneliness is just a cold soup of wanting overturned onto the empty bed […]
Read more
there’s this dream I’ve been having: a shiver of supermodels digging through my grandpa’s old stuff and telling me I’m not man enough when I wake up I put on some Kid Cudi and smoke the day away hey Mr. Rager they pump you full of parties then turn you into a constellation of mortgages, […]
Read more
There comes a point where every small town in Pennsylvania looks the same but this one is mine: like dirt stains on the side of a row home on the end I am ubiquitous, familiar. My toes catch the dust falling through corners cracks, I am a heifer, staring wide-eyed at the sun (cows will […]
Read more
i was born at dusk \ & some nights i still live there \ some nights \ it’s my body in the river \ & my hand reaching up to the moon \ keeping the sky together. \ but honey wants fragile, \ wants sweet. \ he wants something with its mouth wide open \ […]
Read more
your forehead airplane angry baby naked gardener broken break up ceramics recycled trash fiction empty wine bottle the crane we didn’t know what it was allergic runny eyes questionable stain on a trench coat stolen gem ring at the gym salmonella dead deer by the side of the road that dream about that jerk boy […]
Read more
number one soul-seller, preacher in the language of the flesh don’t take this wrong, but you’d look better with the lights off. eyes where my skin should be, rolling back to the bloodshot whites as you push your fingers into a bruise, or maybe it’s as simple as an excavation, the screaming of all the […]
Read more
It’s monday and I eat two lemon popsicles as a start of the week meal replacement. I calculate the contents in my disordered (eating) brain and you tell me that popsicles aren’t food. When I call you mom and thank you for your concern we laugh in smiling eyes about the way we fucked the […]
Read more
Here is what’s borrowed: We have all begun to look for something blue. The whole act is old — cowboy hat and borrowed suit, and just because your mother walks you down the aisle it doesn’t mean you’re A good guy. Old time chivalry with a hot tipped iron, welding the other with burn smack, […]
Read more
Marlena Chertock stunned us once before with her poems in “On that one-way trip to Mars,” and now she returns with another astronomical collection, “crumb-sized.” Familiar topics return with new flair and detail, teaching us more about blackbodies and exoplanets, and imparting more awareness on personal issues like dysplasia and queer life. One of her […]
Read more
Shadows belonging to the people that have died inside me form part of the weight I carry around. I carry ghosts of former friends in my pocket. Look closely, I burned my tongue yesterday after spelling rejection on the skins of those I once shared quiet nights with. The life I live is simple: Build […]
Read more
I remember used. I remember having thumbprints on my thighs // like grease-stains on a cracked screen. I remember being screen // door left unlocked in case he ever wanted to stop by // because he always wanted to come inside. I remember being cracked // dropped on linoleum floor along with a wine bottle & […]
Read more
Let me soil my fortune on crimson-licked love & your fox face. My prayer opens rehearsed bone, you incise through the marrow & drink it, let the keyhole ritual eat me whole. Not that I like it, I just want to remember what it’s like with your fingers slipping […]
Read more
a study: mid-bloom half-rot, my name has traveled so long to find me. a […]
Read more
for my grandfather Rooftop shingles concatenate across the valley like fractal canopy, like RGB pixels blooming over the dusky night. In one rendering of my memory, Taipei is a city stalled on the threshold of morning, recursive function paused on the nth iteration of the scripting of this city that I love, suspended until the […]
Read more
december 4, 2016: i am smoking, my lungs are leaking and my breaths are slowing and i may have taken pills but not without liquor / never with liquor. our breaths clash, like death’s cigarettes. it’s a smart kind-of self-harm. or at least that’s what i used to think. decay and destruction begin to rot […]
Read more
When I was fourteen a blonde boy took me into a field and tried to fuck me in a hedge. It wasn’t a a suitable hedge; there were brambles everywhere. They poked at my skin, clawed at me like the boy who clawed his way up my legs. I lay there, semi-exposed in an English […]
Read more
I think of a number I subtract my siblings from it and divide the difference by father’s absence Convert this into an equation Three times the number is the same as when dust is added to it Take a face into your hands and add it to tomorrow growing in your marrows Approximate your heartbeat […]
Read more
– and nights trying to reclaim the missing years in every swollen mouth and damp split of skin that stutters across my vision my soiled patch of south texas bed sheet my ugly sutured lip that still stings like the first time every time whenever I taste something oiled and sharp like a catalogue of […]
Read more
i can’t write a love poem. awful way to start, like the machinations of our hearts beating in tandem. yours larger than your baby fist & infinitely stronger. i have always learned through abstaining. but i’m hungry. I wanna strip you down to your bones breakable and pale. I’m moonsick. you rise east. thump, thump, […]
Read more
At the Laundromat the cycles wash out Angel instincts from the yellowed armpits Of your t-shirts to exist as you were given Is the kind of dullness a body gets Submerged under ice for a thousand years Until dragged out, placed under operating Lights to only get a chance at ugliness Our hulks have been […]
Read more
the family as an olive tree: something living, something ugly. an old gnarled thing with deep veins, honey-like sap. the family as something too fond of close embraces. the family as something too close to embrace. the family as something with ugly leaves and green-black things hanging from its boughs. not flowers. not berries. fruits, […]
Read more
you hear laurel I hear yanny you hear vinyl I hear caliper you hear sodom I hear I hate your best friend more than you hate my best friend you hear breeding ground I hear dumbell you hear sodden I hear danube you hear liminal I hear plug it you hear pencil I hear number hell you hear […]
Read more
My ancestors never came close to the city. Their graves are on coastlines and in open fields, their last breaths were not in flats but in the mountains and out on the open sea. The first of my family to die here was my father, a man who longed for the country, where he […]
Read more