vagabond city

The Visayan urban myth of Maria Labo goes like this: In another country, an Overseas Filipina Worker (OFW) is gang-raped by a group of men. She survives by turning into the flying half-woman-half-demon, Tiktik. Newly transformed, she rides the sea to return home…only to consume her children, get hacked in the face by her husband, […]

a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath I have long wanted someone to think aboutwhen sleep will not come and exposed time—born to takewhat it can—scratches me so I crack open with sorrow. But I—with my rottingdepressed mind with all my tortured experience of the world—have no one. I am different from other […]

Some pictures in my bird book(c. 1949) are missing. You’ve been missingfor a long time. Even when you were here you were missing.  I bring back no words from my sighting of you at nightstumbling down 72nd street. In my book, the nighthawk is missing.The nighthawk is constantly in the air. Flyingin a zig-zag path. You, sleepless […]

I look out the window and seemyself looking out,the mountains blue in the rain, my profilea cliff under the lamp’ssilver arch, and there’smy forehead,a landscape burned by the moon. Luis Torres is an MFA poetry student at San Diego State University where he has been awarded the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship for Poetry. He also […]

Churning sea of goop,The broth that is left of my body. Primordial soup            That I will emerge from againThe way I decomposed long ago. Vulnerable,             Even inside the walls I constructed.             Walls that protect me,            Walls that may be my doom.  I lay in wait,Waiting for the door to open,The threshold that I cannot cross,          Yet. Learning […]

with Images & Phrases from Shakespeare’s sonnets  for C.M. 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 […]

The cedar chest lives in the living room. I am six, cracking its polished skull open to the lightasking Mom why it smells so funny—               Cedar protects the delicates               like fabrics and old papers from being eaten by moths                keeps everything dry from mold, fungus, oils, fumes.       You know this part in the story. She doesn’t come back.  A […]

it’s wild that some homophobes think                 queerness emerges from a lack                   a victim chalk outline where              some better dad should be                    where pavement collects and       america is a freedom ambulance stuck    in freedom traffic               bald eagle tears    rotten apple    in this scenario only one can live           a broken […]

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 […]