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 […]
Read moreOur mother named you after a lighthouse keeper from a book she read once and I always wondered, when she told me that, if she thought you would be her salvation because it certainly seemed that way with how she spent those hours secluded in her room talking to you on the phone while I […]
Read moreObsession is something that happens to people who aren’t so together. You have a full time job. Forty hours, on the nose. A four-door sedan—moderate, comfortable. You sit in rush hour for forty minutes, both ways, every day. You eat four meals, usually. Your life is full of four. This. That. You aren’t obsessed. You […]
Read morePrompt: 100 words on water. Give it a shot and tag us on Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter & we’ll show you some love! Bright summer nails look like bits of coral floating through the water, I think, as my hand grazes the lake. I wipe five coral fingers on my melon shirt. Solo wears orange […]
Read more6 “I like it for its bits,” she prefaced. She sent me Little Expressionless Animals by David Foster Wallace. It was as if she were trying to kill me. She’d gone through the trouble of creating a PDF I could print because she knew how I felt about holding words in my hands in order […]
Read more(I sit on the edge of a bench facing an overgrown field that has been infiltrated by daylilies. Orange heads bobbing above tall weeds and lush grass. Cleverly disguised snipers waiting in trenches. They call them the Ditch Lilly. An old man sits on the bench next to me. Nods his head. Crosses his legs. […]
Read moreThese knees, will be the pick-me-up when you fall on them. Knees, that you fell upon, crabby and rude in your A,B,C baby swing. You marveled at your mother in her cocktail gown, the shape of her shoes out of your reach. You lay there like a splinter until she picked you up. On your knees, struggling to see. Hide-and-seek […]
Read moreNo, I cannot go back there. It is June, and so, there will be no Christmas lights, or bows on the carousel. And it is late, so, it will be too crowded for me to hear the piano that reverberates on the white tile. That is what I think of: mornings before camp, when I […]
Read moreYou knew it would be someone, it always is. Before you try and count the times the Ohio River has seeped into your neighbors houses. Before you hear the push brooms hit pavement with a resounding crack. You, standing inside your dry house, just out of floods reach, staring at origami swans hanging in the […]
Read moreThis is an apology. I’ve been throwing my hair over my shoulders for too long. Sometimes, I remember how to be still. I’ve tried, but I don’t know how to talk about her. Last summer, my nails were short and I spoke to people about who she was. The backyard of my parent’s home and […]
Read moreMy friend Phoebe is the first person I ever heard say the word ‘feminist’ in real life. “You know,” she had said, “I think the feminists really ruined it for us women.” It was the first time I had encountered the word outside a YouTube video, or a Tumblr post—my peepholes into American culture in […]
Read moreWe met in class. I sat next to her and rested a forearm on the desk, watching her draw a pair of eyes. She looked up. “Can I draw yours?” I wore my hair pulled back into a ponytail, a t-shirt with sleeves that went to my elbows and a bare face; Mallory had black […]
Read moreEvery day the world chooses a darker turn, a crueler path. Apathy seems the best course against this indecipherable savagery, this unspeakable calamity. Like a turtle, I want to crawl within my shell and disappear. So I take myself to the mountains in springtime where its verdurous raiments can soothe my rattled nerves. Here the […]
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the politics of getting noticed in New York straddle borders and sit next to me on park benches. I keep headphones on so they won’t touch me with their Hey what’s your name but that man is still beating one off on a park bench. there are still parts of me that want to be […]
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1 I take flight at dusk, pink and indigo sky stretching each way into infinity. Blue wind over my skin I think of how the world came to be. In a dream last night I was a hummingbird in migration. A sudden storm and I was in descent, torn from the sky.
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I wasn’t even part of this — but it’s spread into everything like motor oil — stays around — I wonder what decides critical — sticky and forcefully there — I wonder who decides who gets a house — I want to know how much money they lost — to lose even more — what […]
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Girl with mouth of river bled dry. Girl whose first blood comes from choking back words too big for her mouth. Girl with tightrope wrists and knife handles in her thighs. Girl like a wrecked car, rusted iron smile. Girl who swallows a sparrow heart and spits out the feathers. Girl and her razor-rimmed eyes. […]
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VAGABOND CITY 