your mouth wants to forget the breadth of this place, forget how you rolled into it & swallowed its lynching rains. for what place turns the things in it into ashes. what place burns into the skin & says you’re an embodiment & a reflection of things cracked & squashed. a boy once saw you […]
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I blame every Santa Cruz summer for every ounce of invincibility I’ve felt, if you can come out of the thaw still deer spry, if you can swallow the sun like those born here, you can do anything underwater & how many times should I have died but at 16 I didn’t believe in death […]
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in cristian’s house there was always clamor the type of place where no deafness of money existed or silence of seclusion like the ocean’s depths and oftentimes we’d sneak up to the top floor where we would fill our pockets with pilfered quarters from his mom’s wardrobe drawer we’d walk along a drainage ditch down […]
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I will come hard On the couch Tell me you like it deep That is it for me This salt ache I can hold you in my mouth For the rest of my life if I want to Feel the pressure release quiet Night refrigerator hums cars pass by I have packed the pots and pans […]
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When I was still a girl, the boys asked when I’d stop believing in magic. They might ask you one day, too and you’ll have your own words, your own beliefs, your own magic. So all I ask is that you not forget the fish that leapt clear out of the water, the bubble you […]
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i. will god let me be a conduit going anywhere i can have you, into elysian fields where i do begin an eager pilgrimage to where your thighs have already started kissing, where i do place my ear to your stomach as a shell to the sea and know the deepest part of you to […]
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a leaf caught between two fingers snatch back the words, unchosen, opting instead for some that won’t place my heart between your palms. I dandelion-wish the next phrase can transplant the muscle from where it’s lived so long on my bloodied sleeve, press it back into my chest where it belongs even though I know […]
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my discount full-size mattress has traditionally been known to comfortably accommodate a maximum party of 2—maybe— on a cool night when the hot air trapped between my legs and the old duvet isn’t so severe as to de-wrinkle the sheets but this night, we bunked our bodies, stacked like buttered toast on a diner plate […]
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Across our bowl deep as our atmosphere, you provide friction for those attempting re-entry. Clouds are garments you put on and discard. You layer them up and peel them off. When you fling them they scoop us up and hurl down on us. I saw your bare chest once on a late summer evening in […]
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it is a bright orange sunday and my fists are unripening and i am still contemplating that baby albino turtle born with a wide open heart – so tender and exposed, a small pulsing blackberry abandoned by his own shell. i try to cup his breaths like running water with my two inconsolable hands; each […]
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i think often of what i am worth in bounties— what would you trade for my teeth back, cleaned? what would you borrow to bring me home? what would even be home enough for me and another person to both know it? i am laughed out of my own voice when i am worried i […]
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Hand me a towel I’m dirty dancin’ with Gina’s pink-budded tongueuntil she lets out a moan almost loud enough for someone to hear.I’ve been a connoisseur of un-out women; now that I think about itthe ones with daddy issues, unstable self-images, and bluntsdipped in promethazine. We smoke gas in the back of Julian’s pickupand you […]
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tuesday nights: fold tiny paper birds smudged white ignore phone numbers i’ll never text tie off lovers like old stories with a string i’ll crown myself jeweled with flowers hide my face cross out the name of you like a to-do list make vows for tomorrow, to growl alone. Stephanie Valente lives in Brooklyn, […]
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You told me you had your first kiss at Papa Chinos by the bushes I was awestruck that a Papa Chinos exists where they have bushes I wonder what kind of a neighbourhood you grew up in Was it a brownstone one, with houses lined one after the other or was it a scene […]
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my mother stands in my driveway holding two grocery bags like twin babies. i crush my cigarette under my foot and say mom, let me carry those for you. i tell her i’ll stop smoking when i’m pregnant and she says i already am my own baby. what i want more is to be my own […]
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i watch as my grandmother, with bordeaux painted arms, listens as my grandfather tells her about the routine details of their shared household: a squirrel that keeps trying to get into the birdfeeder, a new can of pam cooking spray has been added to the pantry, a leak in the roof their son came over […]
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My body is my home, but I shuttered it awhile back, and I’ve hovered nearby like a tangled kite, a drunken bird. Now I look through the windows, knock on panes, trace ledges. My hands follow mossy walls. I see how the roof points to the sky, and I want to live in there again, […]
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Coming back always makes me aware of my space: the pale islands making up an archipelago on my legs, the dark trees encompassing many forests on my arms, the open caverns dusting my face; and dividing me from the continent I call Home— a land mass formed from centuries of tradition but nursing weeds of […]
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Of all my inheritances my father’s appetite pulls heaviest the translucent ache licks my joints sweet a mouth without a mouth begging not for fullness but to be rid of absence a man who praises water’s return to shore transforms my […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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(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 […]
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“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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 \ […]
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