When did you first begin painting? I first fell in love with painting after my parents took me to a van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when I was seven. Looking up at the thick colorful swirls of paint on his canvases—I was hooked. I wanted to make my own […]
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It’s the middle of summer now, but nothing has changed, I attend funerals like they’re parties, receive bad news like they’re just the rent I pay for living, look cancer in the face and then look away—being alive isn’t as much fun when you know what awaits you at the end, being alive isn’t as […]
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The post-Halloween wind comes in, bearing its chill and a raspy cigarette-torn voice. I feel its brush against the branches of our uselessly thin trees, hear its rough attempt at a tune. It has been years now since your death and you have remained silent. Only my own melodramatic mind can believe this voice is […]
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Trigger warning: child sexual abuse, homophobia Age 12: Their parents give them a promise ring inscribed with “True Love Waits,” to be worn on the ring finger until replaced by a marriage band. They wear it daily for a couple of years before forgetting about it in the back of a drawer only to find it […]
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PLAYTEST 1 We’re in your truck. This college radio station will deliver exposition when there’s exposition to give, but for now we’re listening to a two-hour rotation of Alanis Morissette b-sides. We’re off-roading as fast west as the world will load, we’re so young they haven’t even rendered our shadows yet. PLAYTEST 2 No one […]
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we swing on a splintered porch bench, humming amidst the sticky humid mist of July. I try to sing a soft “you are my sunshine” but it comes out shrill. so I just shut up and pucker up for a pink plastic bendy straw. I swallow your lemonade, glowing yellow in a glass mason jar. […]
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I guess maybe recently I have become rather distant Like how I stand in front of the door and listen before making my escape And the cataclysmic pounding of my heart reverberating off the walls of its cage quickly becomes more than I can bear as though it’s reminding me of some dark secret I didn’t […]
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On the road in July, the radio still playing the same songs. I mash the buttons for change when I glance over at the empty passenger seat, the old brown blotch of spilled coffee I never cleaned off. Stray moments of you keep stirring next to me on the highway: both of us antsy to […]
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atomic comets litter the ashen landscapes of my American dreams wish I may, wish, with all my might, for uranium-plutonium rocks to stay crystallized in the stars. no longer have to look up obituaries to find little boys’ and fat man’s smoldering tomb stones: they orbit through front-paged print like steely marble boulders. when I […]
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an atlas of cloudbursts a map of eclipses solar plexus snaps so easy underneath my hand song for the boy with dirty feet song for his bare torso running wet in the riverbed a fanged devil a widow’s peak jasmine and sage in a bowl for the altar a boy […]
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Five story drop to kill a man unless the man’s a motherfucker in which case give him ten just to be sure he won’t walk away. Raised in the shadow of Houston refineries, Emily Pinkerton currently lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an MFA candidate at San Francisco […]
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VAGABOND CITY 