I 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 moreNOTES ON TENDERNESS by KIKI NICOLE
i. & 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 moreGOD GIVES AN ELEGY by DIANA KHONG
my 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 moreBOUGHT AT THE INTERSECTION OF 5TH AND MAIN by DIANA KHONG
if 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 WHICH I HIDE LOVE LIKE LOCKS IN MY STOMACH FOLDS by DIANA KHONG
in 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 moreTHE STARE DOWN, THE STONE COLD STUFF by EMILY PALERMO
sometimes, 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 moreCAKE MAKING by ARCHITA MITTRA
mum’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 by EKİN AYDOĞDU
& 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 moreVAGABOND CITY interviews HELEN ROBERTSON
Helen Robertson‘s collages encourage us to look at the world in an entirely different way, to see each other and the space between us as layered instead of separate, colors pooling and building to build a reality maybe none of us can see all at once. It made us feel thoughtful, and inspired, and connected. […]
Read moreDIALTONE by AMANDA ROSE
Our 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 moreHOW TO LET GO AND START BEING YOURSELF by AMANDA ROSE
Obsession 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 more
VAGABOND CITY 