Ed has a stench that stings like cinnamon.And still here I am in the November stull,washing our laundry while they watch us. We all sit in on the floor and thread letters through colorful string,“Bitches” “Luv” “Toxic” one bead at I time. I made a few butonly kept the one that said “Howl”. Our pants […]
Read more
Our neighbor upstairs had a party and someone yelled, “YESSS this is my jam!”, asAvril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” came on. He started watching X-Files and we know exactly howmany episodes because we hear the theme song every time he plays one. He walked into our apartment thinking that he was walking into his apartment. All […]
Read more
the track tonight, burnt asphalt and heat. the stands, rickety and fullwith ghosts of tomorrow’s morning spectators. you and me,faces pressed against the metal fence, squares of metal leaving grids on our hands. if you squint you can almost see the wall of champions,the carbon fibre smoking in the corner with its packof fellow rejects. […]
Read more
Dia Roth (they/she) is a poet living and working in Seattle. Their poetry has appeared in Verse of April, Olney Magazine, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Dia wishes they could spend all their time submerged in bodies of water, rivers and oceans in particular. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet managed to grow […]
Read more
Megan Falley is in a word: sharp. Her poems have a sting to them that stays and her voice could silence a room. She is water running too hot in the best way. In addition to touring and teaching an online writing course called “Poems That Don’t Suck,” she is the author of three collections of […]
Read moreMom read x-rays for a living, but made a life kissing the bones of a 1932 row home always under construction Dad repairing with arthritic hands from the ground up
Read moreYou are a hitchhiker’s brainwash, a negative gasmask, a pair of waiting hands vacant everywhere You are a hoarder of ridges, a concave risk, heartsick and craving bludgeon exchange in a room of soundless piano keys, pushed in. Lonely carnivore, with a dirty forehead a mouth of murder. You beautiful handsaw, ripping my roots to […]
Read morebeing touched in a charged body by accident bounces bones enough to shed dead skinand leave flesh behind to finagle steady breath without a frame of mind barely attached to a torso danglingout of the car window even if hanging on means swallowing the one-winged mosquitos or pounding a steak until the vesselsrun dry and deformed or become […]
Read more—– cj west is a 20 yr old junior at Emerson College, where they created a major in Performance Poetry. They don’t care what your parents think of her tattoos. Their favorite things are: cats, bread, and women. Two they’re allergic to, one is out to get them. If they can’t change the world they […]
Read morehi you might like the way the moon looks will you go outside and see for yourself put the phone down first open the door then close it take however long you need to make up your mind if you don’t come back before time runs out i won’t blame you doesn’t it look like […]
Read moreyou kept my amethyst in your jacket / so I put a new piece of citrine in your palm / we sit at the bar & talk about cemeteries / tell me about your father again / talk about New York / that one time you were onstage dripping with blood & your best friend […]
Read more15 and she invited me to sleep over at her place minimal adult supervision hours one and two dedicated to mocking a children’s movie because we were not children she let me test drive her violin, first string instrument I ever touched, told me my instinct by way of heritage
Read moreIt’s the talons stabbed and spread through the nervous system that keep the mouse twitching and give it the performance of life. A boy reads the forest floor: A bouquet. A pitying. He reads the horizon: an unkindness.
Read moreParts of me are burning in dad’s ashtray. Tuffs of coiled hair engulfed in flame. Clink of hot-comb against stove. Crackle of fire against pomade. The house is smoky with the burning of my hair the flattening into submission the taming of the wild black the Saturday ritual.
Read morehe was my religion where no god could exist laid slain in his spirit each time his hands pray upon me words baptized in tongues tithed offered in remembrance of we
Read moreI was staring at a map when the men came, measuring the width of Calcutta with a thumb as they told me to stand and led me away. The blindfold smelt of cardamom and I remembered my mother’s shoe-size and the warmth of her body […]
Read moreI was all need you were out dog licking wound & ok/ so I’m destroyer all pressure pace move right through mouth & more do you swoon over Camus or coke & cum turn home melted ponder under slither fingers fighting fodder what kind of blood am I to you with war zipping hard underneath
Read moreI touch myself like a wound & my skin spits up its color like blood. It’s beautiful to feel darkness unattended in the body. To love the backs of our hands, to forget what will end us. I bruise the underside of my tongue
Read moreblack leather boots kick fine soil down from a cliff-side perch – disperses into an ill-coloured cloud, the way my brain feels.
Read moreThey tasted open to me. Her fingers tasted open as chopped lemons; me squeezing the juice into the cuts until she says stop, it’s okay. Fill me with you instead. And I say, awesome, I’m glad you’ve agreed. Time for me. Then all the smoke blows: I every destination of direction.
Read moreA white boy holds his hand like a gun. The earth bleeds out its rivers, I fist a flower. Don’t let them say genesis. Don’t let them say born again. Show me a hunger that names itself and I’ll show you my mouth,
Read moreAnxious Diva puts me up for ransom. I ask her why I can’t feel my body. She just wanted to smell the cake up close. Who can blame her? Herself orbitless, disappeared? Dress sagging below the knees. Miss Charity wearing a ski mask, no panties.
Read moreEven if I run out of water I can still waste light years plotting our ruin with pruning shears. We being beings who shed our skin daily Sometimes during the violet hour to dine On paint thinner and praise temporary faces.
Read moreOn the picnic blanket under the oak tree my father turned to me and said: “We hope you always come back here,” where the shade eases the Southern sun on our pale skin, where we sit in favor, and I felt this birthday’s finite weight: the ratio of lie to light, and the brevity of […]
Read moreHe says things the way spilled milk does, calcium cutting and bone dry, so I cry about it. We stand outside a Mexican diner and an Open sign’s screaming red and blue all over his face as he tells me he needs something more. My
Read moretoday my coworker Brian touches me without my permission & I imagine rending his head from his body with my bare hands / I can blame the impulse on a customer / Joe always asks what scary thing I’ve done to myself today / I always answer in movie titles // in The Exorcism of […]
Read moreI’m lying in bed playing dead lizard because it’s all dry where rain should happen & cinder where we didn’t put ourselves out. That’s the legacy. We forgot to inconvenience ourselves. Don’t know
Read moreTeacher asks me to speak, asks me to sigh, asks me to be dramatic & shy (please?). Nobody ever says please. In my mind a crane is shifting and juddering to a halt. I’m the girl sprawled breathless, drawing myself nude.
Read moreafter Jeremy Radin the unfading birthmark / the right breast, tender cicatrice & ache / the organs who refuse motherhood / the knees, swollen like heavy balloons / the hips, purposeless gates / the thighs, two fumbling giants / the hands, deserts without oasis or mirage / the crescented knuckle that sewed itself / the […]
Read morei didn’t know my stomach would become a wallet for my fingers to pickpocket
Read morei built a glass box with a tornado inside.
Read moreYou will find roads familiar and vacant, daylight obscured by furrowing sky, some congested covering will billow from an apocalyptic breeze. Roadside civilizations will trace piecemeal monuments to all you knew as home. You’ll be passenger to your flesh, and it will guide you, traverse
Read moreBaby duck imprints a mother on the first thing he sees, would stream through a lake with a goose, bear, human single dad. Glazed-eye after- noon, red tide. Last seen
Read more
felt like a magic woman, magic mouth of the Pacific calling to me ’til she could kiss me on my feet. Asked me how I gone so long without lettin’ these feet come to cozy up with the swelling of the shoreline and I said too long ’cause I almost
Read more
INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST LUCIA PASQUALE: What are you currently reading? VANYA TRUONG: I am currently reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s very strange and slightly haunting. I’m also re-reading Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre because I was feeling odd about myself again. Both books are very emotionally overpowering for me, so I […]
Read more
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.
Read more
You have always loved the anatomy of a pixie girl drowning; from my salt- covered lips to the weeds in my lungs, you worshipped me as a false god. When we first met, the water was only just beginning to lap at the shores of my heart. I was thirteen; my eyes were still lit […]
Read more
you do not know. i move from room to room. every morning. moistening my eyes. sucking in my belly. pruning my fingers in juice of mango. weathering my history on my forehead. the women in me want different things. breathing with my hair. rubbing honey cinnamon and shine of the moon on the inside of […]
Read more
looking back, everything is sepia to me now: the pills, the shaking, the undressing, your neck in the shadow of the lost night, the pills, your hair cut over the bathroom sink, the broken front door,
Read more
Mama told me it’s important to cast a spell around nightfall on the first day of the New Year. Some years I forget & maybe those weren’t some of my best, but as the onions caramelize in the bottom of my oldest pot, I whisper some of the other secrets Mama told me about new […]
Read more
i. Sonic We eat in his car, parked, light off, radio on, watching the sun set over the edge of suburbia. Romantic-like. If we wanted, the identical tops of a hundred gable roofs in the distance could almost look like mountains, the heat waves off of the hot summer pavement the surface of a cool […]
Read more
“We’re going to be man slayers,” you told me, fox eyes glimmering. We were nine, on the playground. I knew you would be, with your sharp, fast grin and trickster ways. Already you were revolutionary. You moved through the woods like a sprite daring and limber among the sweet-smelling eucalyptus as we searched for fairies […]
Read more
My first crush was in love with Patrick Dempsey. So I used to watch Grey’s Anatomy so I’d have something to talk to her about.
Read more
There are thousands of poems by women who were misunderstood with fears of either becoming an old maid, or of marriage.
Read more
VAGABOND CITY 