poem – Page 6 – VAGABOND CITY

TWENTY-FIRST by AMY LAUREN JONES

On 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 […]

Everything, Poetry

MALNOURISHED by JACKIE BRAJE

He 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

Everything, Poetry

REMEMBER THE FUN WE HAD WHEN YOU POISONED ME by EMILY O’NEILL

today 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 […]

Everything, Poetry

I WILL DIE CHAINED TO AN ESPRESSO MACHINE by EMILY O’NEILL

I’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

Everything, Poetry

WARP by RACHANA HEGDE

Teacher 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.

Everything, Poetry

SOFABED by CAITLIN BAIRD

Everything, Poetry

HAMPTON STREET, 12:00 AM (FIGURE IN A MIRROR IN TWO PARTS) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT

after 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 […]

Everything, Poetry

SOUTH WILLOW STREET, 7:11PM (BODY) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT

i didn’t know my stomach would become a wallet for my fingers to pickpocket

Everything, Poetry

HAMPTON STREET, 5:21 PM (SELF-PORTRAIT AS SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT) by LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT

i built a glass box with a tornado inside.

Everything, Poetry

HORIZON by JAYY DODD

You 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

Everything, Poetry

A WAKE by CASEY CLAGUE

Baby 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

Everything, Poetry

WHEN I FIRST WENT INTO THE OCEAN I | Jasmine Sierra

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

Art, Everything, Poetry

ART | Vanya Truong

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 […]

Everything, Poetry, Prose

VENUS FADING FROM THE SKY | N. L. Shompole

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.

Everything, Poetry

THE ANATOMY OF A PIXIE GIRL DROWNING | Martina Dominique Dansereau

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 […]

Everything, Poetry

I AM AN ATLANTEAN EFFORT ON MYSELF | Meryem Nuh

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 […]

Everything, Poetry

SEPIA | Fortesa Latifi

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,

Everything, Poetry

ON OLD POTS AND NEW YEARS | Bee Walsh

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 […]

Everything, Poetry

BITS ON SOUR BOYS | Naomi Langer

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 […]

Everything, Poetry

Clementine | Laura Mayron

“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 […]

Everything, Poetry

Wondering | J.C.

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.

Everything, Poetry

An Almost Woman | Emily Nash

There are thousands of poems by women who were misunderstood with fears of either becoming an old maid, or of marriage.

Everything, Poetry

2 poems | Paul Alzate-Moreno

The Calculator So careful, full of measure, You weigh me against myself. My good faces off Against the darkness, And I want my champion, The white knight to win. My heart sighs, Which sways your scales. Your math exercise: Perhaps you do it From fear of calamity. Or you serve some goal Beyond what I […]