Your eyes are the soil around a depressed white root. Nematodes will eat you out of the bathroom mirror when you feel quiet and laboured and you want less nights. Work a fingertip into the dirt and tell me, what is alive? And you know it is everything. Even you. Just as there is always […]
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In this once-was of gardens and succulents behaving madly, who has the ability to call themselves delighted? I want to be variegated with leaves so new I’ll turn to deer and eat my own tenderness. In this difference of Sundays, I want to hear—a molten of gospel, among tuft-y grassesand yellow irises. All chanting in shapes […]
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Eleven, that’s all you’ll ever be.Dark-haired kid holding your face downin a pool, howling Don’t touch me, faggot.Sounds like Touch me, faggotin a world of burning water. Thirteen, eat a weak punch to the teeth, let himlick away the hurt, tell him you’re sorry you didn’t make it more believable.Mud gritting your mouth, pinned to the […]
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I’ve always known too much, bornadherent I entered the world with a shavingof my mother’s hippocampus curvingagainst my palm. I urge / I warn / I caution:it’s dying, it’s gasping for water.This is a family of burdened women. These bodies won’t make it to 30. This is the beginning of genealogy, of lineage, of a door with a […]
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The sun was warm and terrible—too strong for mid-March.I basked in it anyway, enamored with the way it hit your clavicleand just below. Daffodils sprungup around us—I did not mention their prematurity, but plucked oneand tucked it gently in the lipof your jeans with eager fingers. You kissed me, lips hot and wetas the air. […]
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hypothesis: ur seeing moons in the face of the moon. yeah every nite is full w/ ur moon in the face of another man. oh he the Dreamworks logo. he hooked. he dipping his toes into ur ribs. in the morning ur blanket is a milky cloud. a rabbit humping another rabbit. ur toes scare […]
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Every poem is a bodyof water. It will ferryyou across your fear. Javeria Hasnain is an incoming MFA student at The New School on a Fulbright scholarship. Sheis a Pakistani poet whose work can be found in AAWW’s The Margins, Gutter magazine,Superstition Review, Stone, and elsewhere.
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The boy and I make nicebecause there’s too much sufferingand send messages through the flight patternsof migratory birdsand when his answers cawat my window I open it upand cut cloacas in my breaststo let thefat outand I tell him “I’ll get you your surgery somedayI promise”and he says “black feathers blue feathers south.” Noelle McManus […]
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(a poem made from my 2006 myspace blog post) Suzy is a writer from Arizona. She lives in Seattle. Her work is published in Rejection Letters, South Dakota Review, Variant Lit, Monkeybicycle, and others. She’s a recent graduate of Lindenwood University’s MFA program. She’s on Twitter @suzyeynon
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I have forgotten how to sing.At CVS, I impulse buy two bottlesof cherry syrup. Ten percent off,I tell my mother, who shrieksMy god, how sick are you,by which she meanshow dead have you become.The only thing I rememberfrom biology is how to checkif something is alive.I should poke this poem withthe Big Dipper’s handleand watch […]
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I dream of Einstein and lightning describe the splintered tree to you over text how I saw the blitz coming before anyone else You write to me about space about time that gravity affects how the days slip away like a whale pulling […]
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once I was a fawn dipped in holy water.the forest my haven. the trees my family.the flowers my communion. the mist myprayer circle. the creek my rosary. the leaves whispering a promise of heaven. but only if I grew to be the kind of doe the forest wanted. all speckled with beguile and tame and meek. the kind who […]
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35mm the next time i take you to my parents’ house it’s better we leave the catholics out of it and i am at least three quarters of a person mom cooks & cooks hot chicken wings & honey garlic my sister’s favourite a […]
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Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a Sewanee, VONA, Tin House, Watering Hole, and Pink Door fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing. Her poetry, plays, and prose are published by The Offing, Cosmonauts Avenue, poets.org, The Margins, and film distribution company A24. She has […]
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& the other night you held a tree outside my apartment & you said it was perhaps the most huggable tree ever & my phone said it was an apple tree but i didn’t see any apples & tonight i am holding the same tree & it really is a good tree & it is […]
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Birds dive for fish, backdropped by pinkhaze. I watch them disregard breaking wavesand sink shamelessly for what they want. Watermelon, two eggs, five dates. I runmy daily list of what I ate. A net negative,I decide. I roll over onto my stomach, eye-level with the sand. Crabs dartbetween holes. So tentative, they scareat the tapping […]
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yesterday, while lugging a box up the stairsto my new apartment, lungs aching in thestink of a hundred cracked and rotting pears soupy with august under their mother, green and sweetness-heavy. it once would’ve conjuredan image of us, older, in a perfect little domesticcountryside life somewhere, called to mind the songs about dizzying and soft love i collected […]
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I. My eyes have eyes and their eyes follow me everywhere. My shadow has a shadow, no matter how small and green. I have never been afraid to slip into the crowd inside a crowd, lose myself in between the teeming rush of people’s coats. To teeter on the edge of a platform to a platform just to feel the […]
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i smelled jasmine today – cut my lungs wide open. and yesterday, i swear, it was fresh pears on the tree outside my windowmonths too soon. i thought of the way they filled the basketon my bicycle as it leanedagainst the stairs. deflated tires and theache of uneaten fruit. i don’t know where i’ll be when they come again […]
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●●●● preposterous ●●●● how intense grief ●●●● reminds you of ●●●● games it is not: ●● pac-man, ●●● galaga, ●●●● major havoc ●●●● embarrassing ●●●● there is a face ●●●● to which grief cleaves: ● mouth, ● blip, ● gulf, ● whir, ●●●● inaccurate ●●●● the glitching face ●●●● I fight to piece: ● zip, ● clasp, ● jolt, ● wrench, ● twine, ●●●●●●●●●● shouldn’t have opened my windows to you ●●●●●●●●●● should’ve known pain pooled is more […]
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Mahalia Sobhani (she/her) is a barista and social work student in southeastern Wisconsin. She is the oldest of ten and has a Pisces moon, which explains a lot. Her work can also be found in Catatonic Daughters and the Oakland Arts Review as well as the forthcoming Bonemilk anthology from Gutslut Press. You can find […]
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Miriam Saperstein is an artist, ritual-crafter and logistics maven based in Detroit, and soonmoving to Philly. Their writing and art have appeared in ctrl + v, Jewish Currents, thelickety~split, Pollux Journal, New Voices Magazine, and PROTOCOLS. You can find theirzines at miriamsaperstein.gumroad.com.
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no repeats or hesitation.i go first, ‘cause you’re the worst. category is: taste. in my dreams, you taste like stale lemon drops.overripe blueberries splitting down chin, tension wrought between us like a knifeslicing into the flesh of a peach. i cradle the pitin my cheek. dalgona kind of lethargic,seaweed-around-rice kind of unraveling, and so […]
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Britt DiBartolo is a poet living in western North Carolina. She recently graduated with herMaster’s in English literature from the University of Tennessee and now teaches research andwriting to high schoolers. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review,Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s @frangipansy on Instagram.
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pause obsess rewind porn star Calvin Bankskneeling leaning back his hips bounce like a buoycaught in a tidal waveof cock muscle curls oh Calvinwhen you study your reflection do you worship the striationsin your chest? absthat cut & pushthrough the amniotic sac of your […]
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I’m just calling you to ask if you have ever scrunchedthe skin under your eyes and made wrinkles in the mirror and felt like you were seeing time? And when you let your eye skinfall back into place, was it like reversing time, like time travel, like being close to The impossible? I’m leaving you […]
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wai po falls sick in penang. through her cracked lips she still calls it pulau pinang,a palate bad-breathed, wu wei-harmonied to her language, the estuaries she carries in the seat of her spine pulau for island, for mooned blisters, volcano soresthere is a rhythm to dying bodies. when she bleeds, each scab sculpts a fragile […]
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In high summer, I see lovemost clearly when I’m alone. “Shouldn’t a poet be more romantic?”someone asks me. I ask my heartif it ever thinks of me. This morning, I had breakfast by myselfat the hotel and listened to the lobby pianist. Tourists arrive early to Black Tortoise Park andI thought I saw a couple […]
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I let my fingers lie on my bodylike my fingers are a sack of wooden stamps: delicate and foreign and someone else’s.I let my body lie under my fingers like my body is a field of tidepools:jagged, and damp, and a home to many things. I do this over and over: each objectbecoming another object. […]
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a pattern emerging not of need but desperation. nothing new, not even unknown. we dig up the truths just to bury them again. we endure the pain of looking until we have to look away. the pain of staying until we have to go. of being gone until we must return. endless, these cycles, these […]
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it’s 2019 so my New Year’s resolution is to only makedecisions on my period. in March it comes hard and fast, twice. all the bills still get paid, the countertopswiped down. i started eating again and now i can’t seem to rid myself of this hunger. i’ve decided i don’t want my life to be […]
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You remind me ofScene from the Great Flood (1826) by Joseph-Désiré CourtFour pairs of handsTerrified, alarmed, hystericalClutching, gasping, yearning No, not youI remind me of this paintingIn your presenceI become the hands Khushi holds a Bachelors in English literature from the University of Delhi, India, and iscurrently pursuing a Masters in Classics from Trinity College, […]
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Something happened& somethingis going to happen & I don’t careabout any of that action.Emily is naked & breathing slowlybeneath the coversof this morning & really, I don’t carethat she’s naked, either.She’s breathing & I’m breathing& any weather wouldhold us together. Darren C. Demaree is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently “a child walks […]
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if you have everbeen an outsider at school, thought that college was cruel, isolated yourself to keep troubleat bay, depended on a bottle of Old Monk to wash loneliness away, read Maya Angelouand still ended at the therapist’s twice a week, lived from weekend to weekend till the yearwas out of reach, made out with […]
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after David Graeber In the time of plague we turned awayfrom the relentless chirp of workplayworkand placed our ears against the door, listeningfor footsteps approaching down the hallwayoutside the locked room of capitalism.In the shrinking of our circle was a new rhythm,melodies we weren’t sure how to singdrifting through the walls in snatches.With nowhere to […]
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Author of Hinge (NPRP, 2015), Emily Wolahan’s poetry has appeared in Puerto del Sol, SixthFinch, and Oversound. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is currently pursuing aPh.D. in Anthropology and Social Change (CIIS) and is a Poetry Editor at Tinderbox PoetryJournal.
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I was abducted by cannibalsLast night in my dreamsThey didn’t eat me, per se, but after I had aMore holistic understanding of cannibalismIn my own damn kitchenSomeone made a joke about Armie HammerAnd I told them offSaid these are real people’s lives.It’s nice to feel like you know where the real people areOn my left […]
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Your brother’s pewter cross / hangs from your neck; / its dim glow / in the bittersweet light /casts a barrier between us. / In ‘Salem’s Lot they used / taped tongue depressors / to wardagainst / ravenous dead. / It seems that fragile now / the way / I’m afraid / to touch you, / […]
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after Tomaž Šalamun’s ‘History’ Tzy Jiun has breasts the size of grapefruits. Her hair curls wantonly. Thickdendrites grow out of heroverstuffed skull, mycorrhizallike the pregnantly moist soil of forests. She has a metal hook in her wombshe cannot stop talking about.Her wet kisses gush thirst,wet as the gills of a trout. She uses tampons instead of […]
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Dia Roth (they/she) is a poet living and working in Seattle. Their poetry has appeared in Verse of April, Olney Magazine, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Dia wishes they could spend all their time submerged in bodies of water, rivers and oceans in particular. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet managed to grow […]
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Ed has a stench that stings like cinnamon.And still here I am in the November stull,washing our laundry while they watch us. We all sit in on the floor and thread letters through colorful string,“Bitches” “Luv” “Toxic” one bead at I time. I made a few butonly kept the one that said “Howl”. Our pants […]
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Our neighbor upstairs had a party and someone yelled, “YESSS this is my jam!”, asAvril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” came on. He started watching X-Files and we know exactly howmany episodes because we hear the theme song every time he plays one. He walked into our apartment thinking that he was walking into his apartment. All […]
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the track tonight, burnt asphalt and heat. the stands, rickety and fullwith ghosts of tomorrow’s morning spectators. you and me,faces pressed against the metal fence, squares of metal leaving grids on our hands. if you squint you can almost see the wall of champions,the carbon fibre smoking in the corner with its packof fellow rejects. […]
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Not the kingdom of God, being undecidedand all, nor the kingdom of this life, givenits many irregularities and the peach treewith its offspring of oranges but I admireand, dare I say it? love citrus and the decayit’s capable of. I’m capable if I want to be.It took this many years of licking salt cubes.I’m staring […]
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“Don’t promise a pumpkin and deliver a squash.” —Matthew Feinstein I. We nod. We sleep. We wake,wondering about the sun— every night, do we summon it?I wake up supercharged, heaving barbells up a wall of mouths. I believe in poetry above all else. That doesn’t make me anythingbut a poor fish in a brilliant pond of amniotic slug […]
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For a brief moment I want to be (w)reckless—forget the weather, the smell of melted chocolate& jewelry rust on my grandmother’s dying skin.She said there were lemons growing outof my mouth. She knew the fruit but not my name. In the sun I am just another meltingthing. I smile at strangers with all my teeth.I […]
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you sprawl across the thistle of a weedy slope, bones splayed over the hill-belly,friends beyond your fingertips.fog between your teeth. you watch a scant coyote feebling along the flank. too much rib, less feral than winter. pluto yoking at the sun. light out of reach. this will become another day you don’t want to remember. it’s lucky you’re wired for forgetting. your housekeys,the trash you […]
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I A swan is eating another swan.It is not beautiful.It is hideous, and bloody, and terrifying. It is also beautiful. II Your mother goes to the doctor and they finda shadow on her lung. When they open her up, insideher lung is a blossomed calendula. When the doctors askhow it got there she saysshe inhaled it […]
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I’ve become adept at shepherdingheartbreak to minute areas of the body,treating the lesions with smoothing iron and ice in equal measure. I’m an imperfect mechanism,an unskilled plough hand—my pastures razed, my stained bones fallow. I wish to beat my armsinto an instrument more useful to a worldthat’s full and waitingwith cocked hammers. The mystery in my body is spoiling in this climate: […]
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after Sandra Cisneros, in a nutshell, i have returned to you like the way death returns when one gets depressed. grief has unlit everything in me back & forth, but i am jealous of the veinsthat form smiles on my face. Yeshua is jealous of me, i can do what he can’t do of me. hallowed be […]
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VAGABOND CITY 