poetry – Page 11 – VAGABOND CITY

BLOOM by KRISTIN CHANG

I 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

Everything, Poetry

ATROPA BELLADONNA by SYDNEY MCNEILL

black leather boots kick fine soil down from a cliff-side perch – disperses into an ill-coloured cloud, the way my brain feels.

Everything, Poetry

NOW GO AND LOVE SOME MORE by COCO WILDER

They 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.

Everything, Poetry

IN THE DEAD OF SPRING by KRISTIN CHANG

A 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,

Everything, Poetry

SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME by SARA ADAMS

Everything, Poetry

FINAL SPRING by SARA ADAMS

Everything, Poetry

ANXIOUS DIVA by HANNAH KUCHARZAK

Anxious 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.

Everything, Poetry

FALSE TEETH by VANESSA WILLOUGHBY

Even 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.

Everything, Poetry

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

REQUIEM FOR THE MASSES BY RISHIKA AGGARWAL

hair spilling / like crowfeathered blood / razor hums wiping away / ink-scared wrists and mama says / no more girl / no more woman i wake, and she is hanging by the ceiling fan / again. bloodless girl ripping/rippling apart / like still water breaking.

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

Reviews + Interviews

Bethany Mary on Amanda Dissinger’s This Is How I Will Tell You I Love You

If you have ever felt split in half – hesitant but in control, understanding but not understandable – Amanda Dissinger’s This Is How I Will Tell You I Love You may resonate with you. This is a book packed full of duality, guarded warnings and heartfelt admissions, about the complexity of love. Whether the subject […]

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

EXORCISM by RACHANA HEGDE

Mama binds my wounds slipshod, drippy-wet, I watch crow overbalancing, crow flailing, crow falling off the wires. In the dining room, Papa rubs at the sangria stains. The guests calcify under my gaze & I trip, dissonant

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, Reviews + Interviews

Lesley LeRoux on “Howling at the Moon” by Darshana Suresh

“How much can you tell me about love?” asks the bird in Darshana Suresh’s opening poem, “Birds on a Power Line,” from Howling at the Moon (Platypus Press). “Enough to fill my breakfast bowl,” answers the other. In her debut poetry collection, 19-year-old Suresh has more than enough to share about love, loss and survival […]

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

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 […]

Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Poetry

A CONVERSATION WITH AN IMAGINARY FRIEND | Becky Yeker

What does it feel like to feel? It feels like the thoughts of every living person are inside of you, like they are thumping against the side of your head and they are reflecting off of your eyeballs like they are mirror images of yourself, even when they are not you. Does it feel like […]

Everything, Poetry

COUNTING CROWS | Olivia Ladun

I like to call this counting crows. A boy told me he liked me while I was high and crying listening to some indie bullshit. My ex girlfriend smoked everyday, 3:11 pm, after school in her backyard,  and I guess that is sort of cringeworthy. Tell me you like me. I like to call this […]

Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Poetry

THIS IS THE CLOSEST I’LL GET TO PAINTING YOU | Ayah Elbeyali

the beat of your heart– one. two. three. four. the gleam of your sweat– heat. shimmer. hips. quiver. the almond of your eyes– green. kind. honey. mine. the space behind your ribs– ache. flood. furnace. blood. the palm of your hand– red. flower. touch. devour. the bend of your thumb– square. raw. hook. trace. the soft […]

Everything, Poetry

GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS AND GIRLS | Jemma Hoolahan

girl liking boys and girls girl hating labels; hating boxes, but girl loving; always loving. girl falling for crooked smiles; the quiver of eye lashes like leaves in the wind, protecting cobalt irises full of love; full of empathy.

Everything, Poetry

I AM EXACTLY LIKE A WIND STORM | Maia Irwin

I. The night is alive and so am I. II. Maybe instead of the wildfire I long to be I should be a rolling storm. III. Or maybe just the shadows. Maybe the night is harsher than the day.

Everything, Poetry

GABY, HAVE YOU DONE YOUR BEST? | Kaitlyn Crow

My first roommate in the adolescent unit had most growing on her arms and spots of mold between her toes. I didn’t realize until months later that there is nothing beautiful about that.

Everything, Poetry

UNTITLED #1| Kaitlyn Crow

i. I am the mood swings striking in the middle of the night, keeping you nocturnal past three in the morning. They call me mania, bipolar. I am your misdiagnosis, the ADHD pills that made you go insane, the tug of impulse when manic becomes the new normal.

Everything, Poetry

FROM KIERKEGAARD TO REGINE | Alex Lenkei

“Darling, dearest, dead,” Sovereign queen of my heart: You’re the sunset in a cup, you’re the ink bleeding into my marginalia of Aristotle, Kant, and Luther, and in the candlelight alone your face shines ever new across the gradient of my half-worn pages.

Everything, Poetry

GAPS | Alex Lenkei

To be a construction of signs of sighs, remembering memories of encounters that were dreams— meeting-places in the dark.

Everything, Poetry

LITTER ON THE STREETS OF LAS VEGAS | Nicole Lourette

The bare-breasted nun prays in front of children as their parents snap photos of anything but her body. She is not the memory they want of this place. Her habit hangs far below her puckered lips, and for $45, she’ll show you what spring is like on Jupiter.

Everything, Poetry

ST. ANTHONY’S RELIQUARY | Nicole Lourette

There are yellow roses at Mary’s feet and two fingers missing from her right hand. She looks fragile, but the other at the pulpit looks more like a harlot. Jimi Hendrix would enjoy

Everything, Poetry

THE CRITERIA BY WHICH MY MOTHER SELECTS A FATHER FOR HER CHILD | Nicole Lourette

He has to be a white man, under six feet mid-forties intelligent a George Clooney chin

Everything, Poetry

ALL OF A SUDDEN I MISS EVERYONE (EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY) |Michael Prihoda

it’s natural to be afraid, watching the birth and death of the day. this is your catastrophe and the cure,

Everything, Poetry

DARKEST HOURS (FOX AND THE BIRD) | Michael Prihoda

when i was young and heading east these ashes weren’t counterfeit. we avoided

Everything, Poetry

SEA SHELLS | Sarah Francois

Ze sold sea shells by the sea shore no not really Ze sold sex by the pier It was amusing the look on people’s faces The deadpan expression to the straightforward question

Everything, Poetry

Bits | Neobie Gonzalez

In my dream I carry a mason jar filled with bits of Einstein’s brain (stolen before the rest of him was ashes), pieces they still haven’t found. I run up the stony steps of Gaudi’s basilica in Barcelona (built 1882 and finished never). Spires high, bricks laid, most of it a skeleton of becoming. Some […]

Everything, Poetry

LYING NEXT TO SOMEONE YOU DON’T LOVE. | Elizabeth Tobin

The water is next to the bed. I am having those dreams where I am awake again. Whispering take your fingers away in sleepy protest moans.

Everything, Poetry

Losing Teeth | Elizabeth Tobin

Swimming in between stubborn kindergarten gums, my mouth is full of blood. We pull up to that blue house while the kitchen curtain is on fire.

Everything, Poetry

FOR THE AVERAGE MELIPHONA BEE | Inara Lalani

I speak the language of a vanilla-flavoured day. Just beige pastels, and an ordinary tint of a café-au-lait. I have spent a lifetime crawling over a blanket of shells, just to coat my bones in the achromatic pain of synonymity so that my crescendo of affliction remains unheard,

Everything, Poetry

AN AQUARIUM FOR THE DEAD| Inara Lalani

I have this theory, That for six days, I could maybe keep a goldfish alive long enough so that I could see you again. On day one, I would watch the salesman pull it out from its home, and tuck it into a bag filled with more air than water.

Everything, Poetry

Honey & Asking For It| Meggie Royer

Editor’s note: I’ve decided to group these two poems because they respond well to each other. Be aware that there seems to be a theme of sexual assault/abuse. Honey Honey let us take you home tonight so we can rob you of your arms and then put them on again backwards so you’ll always remember […]