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 & […]
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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 […]
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a study: mid-bloom half-rot, my name has traveled so long to find me. a […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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– 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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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• There is uproar at the back// of this poem //which = i am a roaring chariot//= there is a tragedy// in this prologue // •• This story begins from a place of bloodlustgave my body to a butterfly or she gave// her body to me// an agreement sparkled with a matchstick// affection first prayed […]
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Emily Rose Lavrador December 24th We would wait to put up stockings Until all cake had been eaten Because it was her birthday first I would kneel on scraped knees And hear my cousin talk of color, strength, volume Peel up the skin of his wiser words and drape the film over the cantankerous crab […]
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bass boomin shhhhhrrrrrrttt soft tires on pavement chhht, a layered clap & snare from behind me breaths of a nigga behind me, getting closer exhaling to my right off footsteps in the grass & dirt, & one sharp scuff from me sidestepping a stroller steel lock & chain aluminum fencing soft screechin the pressure of […]
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you are always searching for yourself in every reflective surface. now turn and face it. the absence of what you haunted, late at night when you hoped he slept like a petal, a cast off shade moved from room to room. running your hand over every door. you want to be a blessing but you’ve […]
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dedicated to S.B. and L.D. you are my favorite aching summer rainstorm: dewdrop fingers, sugarcane mouth, the valley flooding sweet and deep. you sing all the salt from the sea of my skin. us, our tangled driftwood bodies, merging river limbs flowing home, home, home. Adira Bennett (pseudonym of E.K.) is an artist, writer, and […]
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The box of dry Frosted Flakes at 4 AM is not the first indignity. All night we are chained together, a line of delinquent ducklings going in and out of cages, pressing fingers on the glass, reciting our numbers, staring at the camera. Guards bark: Face forward. Turn to the side. Don’t smile. Toward morning, someone calls my […]
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I dusted my father’s old Bose CD-player. It was once white but now it has yellowed like tintype. Do you remember seeing ads for these blocks on the back of PARADE magazines that came with the Sunday paper? No? I guess your family only subscribed to commercial-free periodicals and only listened to jazz. You did […]
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There really is no good time to tell your mother you’ve never liked boys. Closets do not relinquish their grips easily but I have always instinctively hated dresses. So when my mother asked me about boyfriends again as we wrenched the tails from luscious prawns and cracked their shells with our teeth, I offered the […]
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I am thawed. Deep in winter, I am warm for Emily & she knows that. The sky stays stark & she knows that as well. I am thawed & I still invite her to walk across me. She prefers the shore most days. I can only be the lake & most of my invitations aren’t […]
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your name tastes like the ocean in my mouth the highest arch of green smoothed by sun then white foam fizzing out snapping bubbles kiss my ankles you go on for miles if I think about you and nothing else I can taste you whenever I want my lungs s […]
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my twin, my twitch – prettily you demonstrate your lazy eye the rococo latticework of your scapula – you are most beautiful in braille my hammock, my summer my opium glitch, my tambourine din i’ve been cat-tongued in places you have never lived in tantrums you have never nursed you are killing me to death […]
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Sometimes I suspect I am nothing but a hotel. My mother stays in my lips. My father sleeps in my eyes. My last lover stumbles around With my flowery bathrobe flung on. Yes, there are guests lurking In every floor of this high rise, Even the uninvited ones. My ex-husband twists around my intestines. His […]
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August presses against me like something thick and heavy, sweet perfume clinging to air swollen with humidity. Thunder roiling in clouds like wet wool, apricots ripening and rotting in a blue bowl on the kitchen counter. A shimmering haze, thick enough to taste like herbs on your tongue, with bones weighty and bruised like thudding […]
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if i close my eyes and imagine something warmer than this 30 degree weather, something closer to my family than just being in the same city, with memories more tangible than pictures, i imagine ramen. walking back from my last class, all i can think of is a bowl of steaming noodles, eggs, and chopped […]
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polka dot thunderstorm red convertible we curb parked by the graveyard to laugh at the phallic shadows of cement why not go drink a bottle of red wine on gravel patios just to sit under string lights & feel consumed Chris Barton‘s work has appeared in Hobart, Potluck, Funhouse, Metatron, & elsewhere. He makes lattes […]
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evening played the radio soft, soft as daffodil blinking. we rocked in the solace of rosy oven lights the steps to our dance shook magnets within our bodies cold metal pushing us up against each other the vibration of our collision ran over the counter filled the bread box and our shoes. flooding without much […]
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Months of miles back on the diving end of the highway with the slow jam of July sizzling out. Lost: home. The memory lasts and lasts. Traded one black hole for another cavern: sidewalks, soda pop, polka dots, crushed nips – cracked and waning underneath the squeak and scroll of an antique strut. Phone cradles […]
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low sugar draining her cryptic stare a quiet slumber swallows her face drooping over half eaten rice and beans lips parting warmth needing air grandpa slides the window open dripping soured unease wind unveils my fate tenderly a prophecy rooted in her silence you will remember the taste of mangoes but not the sight of the […]
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I have these memories my mother & I bleary eyed in your southern kitchen, the cicadas chorus as you offer us toast waking us jet-lagged already dressed in your coffin, that bathrobe. I don’t know if it was really there then but I dress you in it every time you are alive in my head […]
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Hands sticky from whiskey I almost drink my paint water Reminding me of another shitty attempt at art On my part Art confuses me I went to the Guggenheim Museum And saw some boring Agnes Martin paintings Just lines and dull colours I left the museum feeling dumb and naive Wondering if I can make […]
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scrolling trees hit mirror light purple in the […]
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Mostly you saw him from beyond the reach of a tempered glass screen, his large hands stretched across the dashboard like the skin of an animal drawn tight. Years after your arrival you christened her birthplace the Texas of the UK: caravans clattering the flatlands like limbs, dawn a dream caught between sleep and waking, […]
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think about your body, is it in the room? enter your body, leave it in front of their eyes. introduce yourself, prepare them for loss. remind them, failure is radical. forget them, introduce yourself to loss. Leave. remember that your quivering is only a bow string. […]
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a glass of wine under starlight. well not starlight but LED feels the same. a glass of wine tastes like rubbing alcohol. i don’t tell you. i swallow. cheers. we are growing. glowing. how many years older are we. enough to pour out our insides and realize we’re in your house. house not bedroom. you […]
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when i move to the city you do not follow the subway goes by and sometimes i catch the smell of newly cut grass the only bars i go to are ones you went to in 1997 the only heartbeat that shadows mine is yours here is a broken glass here is a phone call […]
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I’m thinking about how every time I do it it never feels like anything how A1 sauce is good with fries and the nothingness of a body I’m inside now and i’m sitting and clicking And reading and forgetting A memory is everything, a pressure cooker rings two-thousand warnings and my torso is a radio […]
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when I drive I often think in fiction but this type of fiction isn’t twist-tied up with a pink bow it doesn’t smile at wild monkeys chomping on buttercups in fact it’s never seen a horse, sheep, goat, llama, or monkey voluntarily consume buttercups it’s disgruntled fiction that can tip […]
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thin light unraveled you. as the snow fell on the train tracks, i stood in close opening and gently pressed cheek to ground so i could hear your breathing and the boy moving from one full room to the other while chasing his friend up the staircase – a body that flitted like moon phases […]
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i never could taste the bitterness of decaf coffee until the barista at the cafe on the first floor of the MSU library handed me a cup with the word “ma’am” attached to it, and now every sip of every coffee i take fills my teeth with grounds that taste nothing of the robust heartiness […]
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A few missed payments and see what happens The Repo Man takes you away from that bar on Melrose where you sang with abandon. Country songs. Old jazz. Your movies were pure. You, yourself, were you. What will the stone say? Maybe, “I come from a broken home and I realize it’s the rule rather than […]
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I tag every piece of you I can see and not see when I run out of ink, I prick out my own warm blood. you grin and I dabble myself all over your boxed life, stain your breath and call it my breath, smudge your memories and name them my memories. I say isn’t it so wonderful to be […]
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because i can spread my fingers to reach her southern skies stop reaching, i think bloom sweet in the space of my ribs like spicy flowers in the night amidst a summer’s mist hold me tight no, tighter like the black breeze wetting our windows make fire lick my cheek in exchange for little sweet tastes […]
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Emptiness encased in skies that flutter like fleeting fissures of light through crystal, piercing into me I told myself that cities are built of bricks and stone and concrete poured into holes in the earth, ugly forms of symmetry painted over and over and over and over again until our eyes can glimpse at its […]
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there are the things you can touch and prove like when your tongue goes raw after eating two bags of salt and vinegar chips or when you accidentally bite into a jalapeño chunk you didn’t know was in your queso and reach for your soda but it only makes it all much, much worse there […]
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Whip egg whites, expectations, preheat an oven, carefully cultivate delicate friendships with belligerent drunks. Add laughter by the teaspoons, desperation by cups, and apathy in gallons. Freeze and thaw. Partially defrost. Chill for hours. Pour in buckets of sugar, cinnamon, precious time and effort. Fuck it up; do it over. Scrape off what sticks to […]
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Collapsed into you outside of baggage claim in Pittsburgh. We sandwiched at Primanti Bros. where you picked at the bread, said you were already home sick, jet lagged, but a promise was a promise and Pennsylvania had taken its toll on me; the ice kept on short circuiting the hot wires of my soul. You […]
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but i too wish to be the catcher in the rye when i grow up. and by that i mean i want to protect everyone that is not me want to place everyone else in a bubble away from brokenness. by this i mean that the world is broken and so am i, and i […]
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