vagabond city

You are ghost to me, caught in the rectangleOf progress, the YouTubification of socialInteraction, fitting for a boy (a man) withoutTheory of mind. Numbed to commands of tooMany metal mothers, you become request-makingMachine; I, your playlist, the half hour between startStop. Repeated as if start was Center and center|Everything. Same songs sung into the wishingWeal […]

Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet who was raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. An IAF and Harvard-trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers and land stewards. His writing has most recently appeared in Ninth […]

Brianna Cunliffe is an environmental justice activist and storyteller. As a queer woman who grew up on a disintegrating Carolina coastline, her work explores fiercely loving the fragile places we call home. Her poems and short stories have been published in Reckoning Magazine, Bell Press, Lucent Dreaming, Storm Cellar, Claw and Blossom, Blind Corner, and […]

Trichophagia / but they never called it that / just a bad habit / just a phase / just / she’s a kid / but in flashbulb, hindsight imagination  I think / someone probably should have cared / a little more / that I was eating my own hair / gnawing on the ends like […]

On February 13th, 2019, the rover named “Opportunity” went offline after fifteen years of exploring Mars. In goodbye, a final transmission was sent: Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In the aftermath of a dust stormyour grey body stilled with all the grace of a dogthat dozes inside only the red ghosts […]

after Sreshtha Sen in another life, my hand grips my belly, my other hand an extension of my cell phone, lights flashing in my pupils. nine months will be preserved in my phone’s gallery, waiting to be posted in a carousel. five years pass by and i smile at my daughter circling on a metal horse, bobbing to calliope songs, my camera too […]

i am walking against the cold without much effort. lucky, because my mind is unconcerned with my legs and is working quite hard on optic flow. funny, you never notice a thing like optic flow until it runs with a bit of a lag. suddenly i am still and watching the pavement unfold and the […]

I’m wearing a lavender gownand holding up the waist ofmy Carhartts with both handslike I’m in a potato sack race — we have to stop meeting like this  The same nurse as last timegreets the scrambled output  of my EKG reading with a too-long silence: OddI’ve never seen it do this before  The gap between thunder and […]

We are all initial-ly named what our families can say.Glanced and category theorized, my morphismsurvives to asterism, even as dopped cabochon.To rock the dome is a beautiful breakage,if it happens. Cleave define or indefinite-ly or to infinite stroked to part-icle spark—when -ever it turnsout my grain can do all that and unbag. A Brazilian born […]

Here I am wonderingIf my poetry will make meA goddamn Master of Fine ArtsAnd you with your talking blues. Sometimes entire days pass and one thinks aboutJust money. It’s toxic.Aren’t weekends forDrinking beer and lemonadeAnd getting fucked?Count your blessingsFor they comeEvery few weeks.In betweenDream-crawl orWrite an ars poetica:You know the form so well. Now that […]

I’ve always tried to proceed with caution. The few things we owned I made sure not to break. How selfish could a poor brown boy be? Let alone three? Grassless backyards and baseballs there we were. Unminding any manner we learned in a country that molded & scolded us. America’s past time to pass time, […]