vagabond city

Back then, a few bodies ago, you knew how to get your dreams delivered. You would sleep in the shape of a question mark and the empty side of the bed would be the silent answer. Now the silence is broken by you answering the door late, groggy. Now dreams are strangers’ hands, with covered […]

Addison Branson (she/they) is a poet, data analyst, and anthropologist from Winston-Salem, NC. As a queer writer, they explore themes of identity, broken connection, and the disaster of human experience. When she isn’t working, Addison can often be found at a local bar enjoying a white negroni, engrossed in a book, and enthusiastically playing cards, […]

It fidgetsforever restless, migrating through meby the minute, blooming like a bruise beneath my skinfrom a fall I don’t remember taking,its tendrils ticklingas it scrapes away the subcutaneous layer—It growsin my stomach like a watermelonfrom a seed I don’t remember swallowing,my chest is hollowing, if I tapthe points of my breaststhe echo bounces back—It stretchesmy […]

i want someone to fill my mouthwith marbles—the opaque kind, with milky swirls of blue. i’ve spent so long like this—saying everything to please everybody else— that i need to start over from a mumble. i havemouthfuls of shame stopped up inside my gut, piled like sludge in a barrel, like bile waitingfor my morning […]

After Ada Limón Rain is the truest bright dead thingI’ve ever been afraid of. Rain as it beatsagainst a window, tiny little bodies,each drop a chance to catch something beforeit splatters. I live most of my lifetrying to avoid disaster. One day,in our car on the way to churchMy husband asks me what I’m thinking […]

did you know that you can reignite a fire by the tail of its smoke?sometimes i wish to be bright orange ashascending and illuminating the deep blues and wisps of grey. i could lie and say that smoke trailed into my eyesbut i cried within to the heavensasking for a flame reignited. i don’t need […]

It’s dead. The horror movie stag stared into a dollar store’s heaven. I stood with crossed arms, a grave marker model, skin pressed  Against the city’s street island tree until the sickly bark raised grooves of red ache Returning to a singed harmony. Pain is normal, this one’s new. Smoke billowed from the scattering sparks, […]

the floor-to-ceiling windows matter more than the whitish print ofa something bird, perhaps crow-like magicking through the corpseas if it were the first thing to die; i refused to kiss that bird watcheronce because she ordered quail eggs at dinner in this economy in this restaurant where everyone can see her eating another’s youngin this bed […]

The weekend night has a gash in its belly,deep and red, bleeding smokeinto the cool, darkening sky. Tomorrow,we’ll mourn in our own wayunder stale Monday morning sun,or in the pools of our noon shadows.At home, this grief drives us to mementos:bedsheets browned from barefoot walks,the bitter smoke smell from the clothes in the corner. Devon […]

Write something about sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. Get more specific. Write something about sitting in a doctor’s waiting room as everyone else is escorted down the mouth of the sterile hallway by nurses in purple scrubs. Describe the smell of antiseptic. Write about remaining in the plastic chair long after the lights go out and the doctors go home. Write about coughing […]

With viscous clouds of lighthair-thin on your Vaseline lips. Pearl-lit sweat through yourravine hands. This is not half of the half that I remember:the kerosene whistle of your skin, spit collecting in the saw-toothof your mouth. Your blue-smothered eyes. Everything I remember is noteverything I wanted. Nor is it anything that I did not.There was […]

My mother asks us to be quiet, to not let words come before thoughts.And I think of women kept in cagesIn houses where they kill the birds. My mother asks us to not make trouble.She pours wax in our open mouths and it hardensI obey and my teeth leave impressions. When I try to swim, […]

To hoard –silent stare,light flickeringmouth agapeand emptyswallows withheldwithering vineimperfect harvest.Evenworm riddledthe apple sweetensand buzzes.Evenunlapped,the juice ripens.A symphonyunstruck. Serah Wolfe is a poet, painter, and writer dwelling in the American Midwest.

It turns out, if a person takes all the anti-anxiety pills at once,anxiety disappears forever.Everything disappears forever. My mother was the age I am now.I, a child. All gets crushed beneath the weight of a single fact.I don’t remember leaving the house. Don’t remember packing my clothes,my guitar, my baseball cards.Her Stephen King novels, which I’d read with jittery […]

Dakota Smith (she/her) is a poet, performance artist, and writer who received her MFA from Randolph College. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Good River Review, Imposter Lit, and The Westchester Review. She lives in New York City and is on Instagram as @likethestates. 

i want a miracle so plain,so unassuming& without drama— a bush full of leaves the sea as it is the sun swirling through the skylike the gasses its made of the miracle must be happening: steam rising from the wet woodlike ghosts leaving the body murders of crows eating the bambion the roadside two coyotes […]

It hits better whenyou predict the weather wrongly.Now is a weather for big feelings—wordless big feelings.But I’ll try to word them for you.Listen up— with your body, I mean. So I see a deep cloudy portal forming west.A sky folk braces her chariot,raging, charging into nothingness.I see a sky folk perform a southern smile.His hair laid […]

I left my jacket in the woods one day & cried when I realized  I came back to the spot a few days later & there it was, hung on a tree like a coat rack  all over it,spiders had nestedin the fabric / hiding from the cold October air  every time I lose something I feel so small  but at least the mistakes I made have kept […]

after Kaylin Haught  I asked God if it was okay to like other girls and he said absolutely not I asked Aphrodite if it was okay to like other girls and she said of course I asked God if it was okay that I take a break from going to church and he said never I asked Aphrodite if it was […]

Craig, you’re killing me. You singthat flavor we all still taste, the way you start drinking coffee black to live past middle age and there is a nuttyquality, a sweetness not sugar but somethingmore true, reminding you coffeecomes from a fruit, and you know what’s not good for us and evoke those old pick-up-truck-in-a-field parties as something like […]

When you see a bird flying. All others. Geoffrey Wessel is an American diplomat and amateur philosopher who enjoys thunderstorms and once translated the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights into 720 lines of iambic pentameter. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill and the London School of Economics. He lives […]