your hair’s wet because we went night swimming the mothlight furring my forehead together and pulsing with the spectral heave of the moon these tides knowing me the way i know myself pensive and cold and slick along the insides. hoarse siren song and the fuzzy swan-curve of my neck the waves carving me into […]
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I could hear the bomb tick in your jacket. Between layers of leather, so close to chest. I wouldn’t have noticed if we hadn’t been pushed together on the train. You caught my bags and fall and I had to say thank you, fist making a zero around the metal pole. Now I eat from […]
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In June, we are inside out, mistaken for blooming. We steal apple blossoms, pluck them from low branches like burs from horsetails and braid them through our laces as we do between the trees. We snap stems into hairclips and paint our eyelids orange with pollen, our ankles gray from parched dust that floats on […]
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I want to set my skin on fire but I’m supposed to be at his apartment in an hour when i come across the dress. a long sleeve, four inches above the knee length floral patterned dress. it was hidden away in the back of my small dorm room closet it is hidden with the […]
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You know what? I like you. I confess this to you in English, staring at the back of your dreadfully empty chair. Yes, I write you notes. Page 1: In art class you told me that watercolor painting was less painting and more making mistakes and being proud of them. You have hairy arms and […]
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and we’re lying on the floor blanketed by a darkness that presses into every part of the room except the candles on the bookshelf an ellipsis of three small flaxen flames for a moment with the television muted it is just the two of us tenderness in chaos but with fresh tears the three little […]
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凉粉: cold noodles best served on hot summer days. I watch 妈妈 dip her hands into silver bowl, scoop starch, chase a village long-gone; and I want to hug her but her hands are tied, her apron is tied, her feet are tired – of standing on lands not made for legs bent under weight of loss […]
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[12:13AM] revolution is a self-taught language and i’ve always been multilingual. [1:38AM] some rot can be cut away with a fruit knife. [6:54AM] most mold cannot. [7:01AM] pick up. please. [7:10AM] there will be supermoons and moths with funny names to look forward to someday soon (atlas moth, comet moth, death’s-head hawkmoth, emperor gum moth, […]
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on some days i am not birthed on others i am lake ripples dragging my ring finger over your thigh these nights i dream in anaphora, on some moons i am catharsis on others i am dry, swaying tree branch you remind me of cinnamon & on some thoughts i cannot help but cry because […]
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i am tangled in the textured cracks of your cinnamon swirl palms so i crinkle up our poetry into an atom i am chipped nail polish painted over i am pushing the pebbles deeper into the earth with the heel of my knock-offs you are the dark splotches where the columns meet the ceiling, like […]
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my lover is in my bed while I dizzy peruse night streets by full moonlight
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I think maybe I have stayed here too long amongst the new trees and cities. Think I have played the role stranger played my song inside my suit to re grow the skin of my kneecaps.
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STANDING @ A BROKEN PHONE-BOOTH W/ MONEY IN MY HAND BY PRIMITIVE RADIO GODS FROM THE CABLE GUY SOUNDTRACK no, i was not working on the southern alberta pipeline when i wrote this yes, my still-bird hands have assuredly gone soft but you do, in fact, desire a pops want of large pumpkin, middle pumpkin, […]
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i am sorry i thought you were a human-shaped vending machine i am sorry i forgot to take my body with me to your party i am sorry carnivorous plants eat animals because they feel alone i am sorry i feel alone when we are body to body in a room i am sorry i […]
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the dark of night is really just about 13,000 ravens spread across the sky lava is probably a good dancer my nations multiply
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figure 1: and you were talking about fucking on the beach (about having sex on the beach) and i was reading everything you said choking on sandwiches constantly choking on things going down the wrong way and coming up as something more filled with feelings than i meant to ever really feel and you were […]
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Concertina clavicles, you shrug and knitting needles escape flesh. Much genuflecting will follow. Alight, we shuck oysters and lick pearls. This is making love. This is the Northwest Passage. This is the loose thread that preludes hallucination. Imprisoned in nomenclature, you are unbridled and scathing. I wait for the word. One word and the sea […]
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meteor showers are akin to childbirth disasters waiting to happen a blinking vessel a product of snowflakes splitting blood interpreted as fingerpaint kissing the unturned cheek
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hoping to be more intimate with myself & otherpeople open|shut muted exchanges
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mood: anxious mood: waiting for your friend at the bus station mood: wandering aimlessly while eating a Cliff bar mood: “are you looking for Transit or Rail?” mood: soldiers in camouflage hovering mood: that aren’t traveling mood: getting too hot from wearing a jacket you don’t want to take off and lose mood: afraid of […]
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It was the month of photoshoots and diagnoses: your skull is shaped like schizophrenia and you need to rest.
Read moreI like to fall sometimes. I like to see the blood. When it flows from my pores into rivers, dams, and streams- like velvet currents of rage and sorrow. I am open like a wound, raw and tender.
Read moreYou used to grope weather forecasts from my throat, beg me to say “I love you” with the subtitles on. and I hoped no children came from our union, in fear that I would birth late-night infomercials alone. We were thing and owner, watching, changing without a chance. —– Hannah Cohen is in her mid-20s, […]
Read morei. & i once knew a Truthi swallowed it whole after we fuckedhow it crept thru on the down low,real slick,thick & heavy & embarrassing.love looked at me & exhaledgushed a song out of their mouth all“didn’t u like it?”i wanted to say it was all i had to live on.instead i lingered in the […]
Read moremy white willow name is doctor, creatorof cold sheets, levee raiser as i kisscheek & child, i am softer in my ownhands, but hard as light parsed through a man’s lens to empty cement giants and husk men i have left retrograding, i am sorryunder my heel: rainwater, my toe: typhooni am all weight, all heat — […]
Read moreif i am dead, then you are dying and we both have no recollection of a hard face-full of linoleum tile. if i was a drink, i’d be drunk; we are singing hymns from our cross-legged pew days. me, running my heel up the inside of your thigh. we, pretending we’re alive because we’re flesh […]
Read morein red season, my teeth hang off hingesand i’m tonguing door stops with myknees staked into the linoleum untilyou are home again.you loved me once before i knew whata past tense was and netted myself ina set of skeleton keys, that is my body,i say; i say it — my body is hereyou loved me […]
Read moresometimes, i still feel the heat of every hand that’s wandered across my body. shaking always shaking, earthquake veins, an uncertainty in the world, stepping on the ledge and looking straight down, neck tingling at a ninety degree
Read moremum’s polka-dotted apron would be stained brown and yellow; a child would peer at the strange orange universe inside a yolk and a crow would search for treasure inside empty egg shells lounging in the sun.
Read more& so i climbed the fig tree in my grandparent’s backyard, so i sat there the entire summer of my sixteenth year, ate nothing but figs – unripe, overripe, hard, soft, juicy, sweet, sticky, cracked open like my […]
Read moreYou and Leroy are in the Moon’s parking lot. Leroy always says that if you go between the hours of 1 and 3 am, you won’t have to deal with the police department. Leroy was never wrong. The Moon is the highest point in St. Charles County. It is a 75-foot tall pile of grey […]
Read morei am watching you walk where your feet, smaller then, stumbled | muddied | blistered pre-bound, pre-ballet, danced differently. what if i knew where i was when you were still- child laying your legs’ down roadside, blonde hairs blooming
Read moreIn an alternate version of today, I corner each whim w/ a lullaby Hush—there’s nothing interesting about a resistible urge Instead, a card left face up so its forces leak, lap the hours
Read moreRaindrops gathered on my nose like a piercing. It was that just awake, yawning Delhi rain Leaving me not quite wet not quite dry I am quite honestly lost in these gullies Rain has that faraway look in my eye quality— It scoops out my soul and scatters it in the dirt. Swanky house Block […]
Read moreI had a dream where ashes rained down from the sky the night made so black it felt primal in the dream my father is saying ‘sacrifice.’
Read moreI travel westward to reach earlier time zones. Cross a line and I am an hour younger, though my body doesn’t know it. I will extend my life this way: by crossing borders. My ancestors did the same because they knew that the only hometown is the skin,
Read moreA blush of night-bloom. That exquisite last word. In the type of family that could afford To fall apart, a young girl grows More hands than things to cling to. She’s Just thumbnail innocence, motel white Wallpaper thighs and perforated silence In glitter flecked too-open hands.
Read moreA boy is burning in my bed and as I watch his face disappear I curse the world for teaching me how to be everything but water.
Read moreI sometimes wonder how, when I am not paying attention, from behind me, like a cinematic ghost, you creep back into the creases of my skin, where the sister-parts of my arms meet, the length of them seeming to break in two. Stiff like joss sticks burning down to ash, propped up in bricks laid […]
Read moreI was the fishes’ lungs, the earrings 1 on your daughter and polyphonic you were checking the time. – a hell of a way to go, uprooting leg hair 3 and the picnic plate tongued by flies. When the news called me exceptional they spoke into a microphone of me: the […]
Read moreMom read x-rays for a living, but made a life kissing the bones of a 1932 row home always under construction Dad repairing with arthritic hands from the ground up
Read moreYou are a hitchhiker’s brainwash, a negative gasmask, a pair of waiting hands vacant everywhere You are a hoarder of ridges, a concave risk, heartsick and craving bludgeon exchange in a room of soundless piano keys, pushed in. Lonely carnivore, with a dirty forehead a mouth of murder. You beautiful handsaw, ripping my roots to […]
Read morebeing touched in a charged body by accident bounces bones enough to shed dead skinand leave flesh behind to finagle steady breath without a frame of mind barely attached to a torso danglingout of the car window even if hanging on means swallowing the one-winged mosquitos or pounding a steak until the vesselsrun dry and deformed or become […]
Read more—– cj west is a 20 yr old junior at Emerson College, where they created a major in Performance Poetry. They don’t care what your parents think of her tattoos. Their favorite things are: cats, bread, and women. Two they’re allergic to, one is out to get them. If they can’t change the world they […]
Read morehi you might like the way the moon looks will you go outside and see for yourself put the phone down first open the door then close it take however long you need to make up your mind if you don’t come back before time runs out i won’t blame you doesn’t it look like […]
Read moreyou kept my amethyst in your jacket / so I put a new piece of citrine in your palm / we sit at the bar & talk about cemeteries / tell me about your father again / talk about New York / that one time you were onstage dripping with blood & your best friend […]
Read more15 and she invited me to sleep over at her place minimal adult supervision hours one and two dedicated to mocking a children’s movie because we were not children she let me test drive her violin, first string instrument I ever touched, told me my instinct by way of heritage
Read moreWe used to be able to collect the dust, to make whole families out of the dust & though those families were never able to fit a ship inside of the bottle, they could could give themselves wholly to the land that made them. The hard times took
Read moreI touched raw fingers to the strings. Felt how gasping for air after being hooked, feels. I’m so long out of water. Somewhere in the background Momma is warning, Do not touch… pero, it’s so shiny, so shiny.
Read moremy dear [ ], a.c. said that fragments are good things to inhabit, so i love you?/ i don’t know what this feeling is, because the last time i had a crush, i wrote songs for someone else in a way of disguising who it was for. (my first published work is really for you.) […]
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VAGABOND CITY 