Poetry

Em Norton is a poet from Toronto. You can find Em on Twitter @_emnorton and read more at patreon.com/emnortonwrites.

                        After Frank O’Hara is even better than making vegan pumpkin pie like I did last Novemberor filling my stomach with stone fruit samples at the embarcadero Saturday market partly because in your 19 year old you’re like raw almondspartly because of my affection for you, partly because of your affection for the jetboilpartly because of […]

When they cleared out my gutI couldn’t do anything. I was staring at the ceiling blowing kisses. The ceiling ran away. My arms fell off in a very sexy way.It doesn’t matter. My legs  are the only part of methat I want to survive. Maybe that wasn’t direct enough. I am dying very soon. Even looking like […]

I sat and there a scatter         of bushes, earth & one         purple flower fled       like jazz notes, the station he listened to & something his fatherused to listen to, pre & post a lotof things. One night I asked if it hurt, his father & the silence& he said no, nothing ever        only hurts.        We continued to […]

after Michael Garrigan Sometimes I thinkwe went therein a dream (together still) lodgedinside the sleepingbody of the boy I used to be. Jory Mickelson is the queer, nonbinary author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications […]

Mara Beneway is a poet, illustrator, and educator from New York. Her work has appeared in the Bread Loaf Journal and Gandy Dancer. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Florida.

I have told you this before.There are no beginningsto be found here. Here,there are only reflectionsof birdsong in passing wind,only layers of ash in place ofsky. Should your body unravel,it will do so in layers.Be sure to catch the bonesas they fall. Stop waiting for signs.That is to say, stop listeningfor blood. You must understandthat […]

            for Ryan Home in timeto watch a drunksun stumbling. It flashes its pink ass & jetslike little crucifixescross the sky: I know such audacity, the needto burn & then beburnished, the urge to vanish: I’ve drivenoff the road with darkintent. It’s just my hands that spared me.It’s scary, being so closeto the mirror you […]

her home-bleached hair, the strong smallness of her,the slippage of her soft walk in the rain,today this girl reminded me of you—the thrumming weight of how I wounded yousomehow inside the curve her shoulders made.I watched her blue shoes stir up limpid poolsof cloud-water, and my expired want  for you mixed itself in, gasping and soaked.last […]

I ain’t the good kind of Asian. I’m the onewho disappoints you. I see it in your eyes when we go out for sushi and I forget what nigiri is. I feel it across your tattoos I’ll kiss someday:  koi fish samurai and fisherman’s wiveswide-eyed cats with claws outstretched characters faded indecipherable, strewn like wreckageacross your […]

next thought—isolation is a beautiful syringe. next thought—when i went to Chicago that summer i took the train.  Illinois is a whole lot of nothing. neutered landscapes in a lilting breeze. grain silos round as asses.  Midwestern topographies are bargain-bin paintings everyone wants hung in their bathroom, which is to say  something, probably. maybe i like to be […]

To Illness, With Love i am sorry that i broke you or used you to break myself i amsorry for the commotion that followed i amsorry about the quotidian pain like a skipping record i amsorry for the pills thrown in a blender to help us i amsorry for waving your laundry in the faces […]

The arch of the sky keeps pulling; no forecast of rain;Over us clouds undeveloped into silk chaining east to west. Above the tedious skyline the early sun brings colorsbrings news of a warm day. But we’ve become too lazy to imagine better days than this,both you and I, perched on the park bench,watching the brittle shadow […]

do you want to see a magic trick?would you like to try swallowing me whole?have you ever peeled open a tangerine?it’s like that, only you keep going, until there’s nothing leftbut infernos, do you see?can i ask you one more question?will you still kiss me when i look different?will you? will you? will you? how […]

Summer again like a switchblade in my throat. We were girls then, gamboling in glades thick  and honey-sweet with clover. All of it belonged to us: the dusky purple scent of the tobacco fields,  the cicadas buzzing in the chest-high grass, the sleepless meadows only our feet tread.  We rinse the lake water from our hair and dream long […]

maybe death isn’t deep and wet and cloying like / a well maybe death is /a shallowing a / drying up / think of the pond that forms / in the valleyfrom snowmelt in the spring think of how / it shrinks with each hot /summer day by august / it’s gone maybe our lives […]

tell me it was gentle,             like when my mother brushedthe hair from my forehead and said,                         if God wanted you to fly, He would have calledyou Icarus                                                 and with her feverish           fingertips                                                running through my roots I asked,                                                         do you want to be                                             Daedalus?  [name added to “when I transition” list: Icarus]  —  I wanted to give […]

This is what is most familiar: Lemon-sucked lips kept still on skin.Fingers, long and knuckled, sweeping across a scar fainter than summer.The back and forth motion of keeping ourselves whole. How your smile,all honeyed and good, makes a hymn from its own ridges. You like to pick atyour palms like insects suck at bone. Your […]

and suddenly I’m a moth serenading the stunned lightbulb. O winged glass, through your whorl of God’s deftness, from a corner of this midnightforest, do you see my broken nose, its septum tottering from indecision? How it spills blood like a waterfallforking gravity. When my uncle was depressed, I blamed it on his innate goodness. […]

My mother remembers teaching herselfhow to draw stars on a foggy windowwhen she was five, fifty-five years ago.Most of us look to the sky for release. My neighbor, at dinner, proposes thatwe are but molecules. That perhaps ouruniverse exists as one fabric weavedinto a shirt and our beyond just wool. Many places are full of […]

i want to devourmy loneliness& throw it upon the page.you told me oncepoems need each otherthe way humans do. that night,the moon was so brightit wrote your shapeon the sidewalk. you had eyesas wide as mercury& i rememberfalling into you,letting your handsclose around melike an atmosphere. in the morning,was the sun.in the morning,you kissed mein […]

Cockroaches / getting pregnant / never having children / menstrual cups / hanging upwithout saying I love you seconds before someone dies / my dad crashing on his way topick me up from the station / my train crashing, blood and bones and tangled hair lefton the tracks / sloths and their strange hands / […]

we still believed in hot lemon water in the morning, still believed in the miracle of breaking out into a dance anywhere, never quieting down, the rookie optimism that our best parts would remain the same no matter where or who we shared them with. now every summer something like grief tears inside our bellies, […]

Today you will reorder yesterday for the sake oftomorrow. Something will bubble and froth behindyour left ear leaving behind a sensation like whenyou first bite into a perfect and juicy apple. I havean eye and a tongue and a soul for juice and so feelbold about this assertion. Even when we are apartmy mind fills […]

HornyTopNow proposes a sexorcism            in your DMs when he writes: let me fuck the hell out of you He must think his penis is God’s            gift if he can save you from damnation, but you don’t believe him.            You’re atheist & to you, angels are just            a slutty Halloween costume. If there is a devil, […]

after “Poem After Reading the Chapter in Stephen King’s It Where the Word ‘Kike’ Appears Six Times” by Hannah Cohen, “gelato” by Matt Mitchell, & “in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say” by Danez Smith the adriatic sea is a body of water, so etymologically i am born from pockets of salt / […]

“why am I growing out of myself” and the opening songis a gunshot wound that never closes up and inside exists a portal to thirteen where the slashed armstill bleeds black, drips until tar becomes speed bump but we have already tripped over the casualties ofgrowing up too fast and there are no longer picnics […]

you tell me ice wants to be warm. a television screen, spastic with tiny spines,warm from my fingerprint smeared across its face. i do this to you, but i am not pricked. before work, a bundle of coriander stripped by the night’s wind on the porch-step.once, when little, i constructed a fence from the broken […]

Suddenly / late summer / shirtless in the loft / he watches me / surmount the top rung / Soft timothy exhaling June / The twine breaks / spreading blue / purple florets on which we lie / about men / the Virgin / glistening skin / senators and welfare / other things we cannot […]

I. It’s tough to admit, but I can’t stopbaby-talking to the guillotinein my closet. I can’t stop wearing orangeand clicking like a house in the sun.I just want to find love, testifyto the power of pedestrian walkwaysthrough the minefields of early death.No reason for me to be inconclusive,circus-like in my heart. I belongto the ice […]

Three days after swearing off sex, I message an old tinder date. We talk about coming home to ourselves, recovery, and tarot. She asks me, in what ways do you want to be more grounded?  And I want to tell her about Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, how fifteen hundred steel spheres lay on the ground, and reflect via convex—how the viewer […]

            After Antonín Dvořák Mvt. I: Allegro in / the belly / of / the woods / we toss kindling into a pit // jagged geometry /of combustion // strike matches on our skin //watch the campfire work / its teeth through mountain blackness // & I am incendiary // north windlurching / in from / upper / […]

                      a hue of hospital neon                       sits above exposed cotton guts                                  of waiting room sofa in the early hours of my procession, morning orange draws a halo            around my pale head.  there’s a field in the midwest where be a man still echoes            off the corners of tick-painted weeds resting atop a cliff overlooking a shallow marsh.  it is too late to go back,                                  one of the […]

                                                     after Anne Sexton’s “Yellow” When I finally feel safety again I’ll work it around in my mouthuntil it’s all balled up, I’ll spit it out, I’ll bury it shallow in a loamy field. I’ll plant a shield of sunflowers around it, I’ll encircle them with apricotpits, I’ll pluck every downy feather in sight, I’ll write a poem called Feral […]