shore nursing rubble water scraping brick teeth carmines, umbers urban abscess, coaxed into gaze by strings of 8 o’clock light an invitation to squint. ombak, waves me sand-laden, dragging teenage feet through coast, dark and happy grinning at the sight of Makku, my mother always perched on a...
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect speckled eggs...
I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...
just north of the texan blackland is a home with a stale teapot. an abandoned rain boot is the perfect centerpiece for the bottle cap table. and when it rains, it’s where to keep all the petals she’d stuffed in the tissue box. candy wrappers keep us warm. it helps, the crinkling they make...
someday there will be more doors someday we with ambiguous accidental bodies who carry the debt of shame in the thread of our bones will no longer need to be divine someday we will learn to see the shadows on our faces rivered impressions at the spill of our hips for what they are marks from...
hide her inside a ruby. use every pronoun so they can’t pry program from machine. bury him in the left pocket of your bathrobe. lay yr tenderness out to dry on the rails. no one will suspect a thing & even you sometimes will forget it’s there. when you remember her again, they will come...
my parents die in. I do not pray to the sun before it buries s- in the pane of my apartment window then leaks and pools over the pavement sky. Rain traffics my apartment window and dries like vitreous cells, like siren prayers and the river of cars stops. Dies. Sin slows, stops, on the kneeler of...
after Fiona Pardington It is between pest and cholera, she says the world, this state of affairs, down her long, straight lashes she stares, describing the falling of her thoughts on the great indifference of many, thoughts that are weighty like sand in the bottom of an hourglass as we drift past...
Not that it’s enough, simply to adore a person But I adore her The way sansevieria reaches for the perfect ceiling The way hypoestes develops its pink spots like dark room photographs The way arthurium sucks on ice cubes The way golden pothos rests in a trail on the hardwood floor The way aloe...
My sister and I stand barefoot on the radiator, our lacy night dress scratchy against our shins. Delicious jitters as we clutch the high window sill. Night touches our bodies freed from sheets tucked in too taut. A flash of light splits the dark, spiders down electric blue. Thunder shakes the room...
She _ites my lip just a nip a fizzing on my skin we wait at the _us station under zeeting streetlights they crackle like a chip _ag I envy the susurration from the am_er halo, want to tell her “see, that is what is generating the electricity not your z axis cheek_ones or the _atting of your...
i’m from here, drifted in from there, waterlogged, kelped, the sway of the sea still in my knees, where my motion sickness pulls from. like Bà Ngọai, i’m walking as i’m balancing a fishbowl upon my neck, my eyes convexed behind an unseeing lens as clouded as her mung bean yellow cataracts. i miss...
terra nullius: the inverted disposition of thingsin ordinary flux, logging roads and peri-urbanlawn ornaments replicated on the clouds’ nuclearpetals, I watch the patterns on her dress orbit myeyes, my face, my mouth, overlap with auxiliary species of our scape, a cosmic bodice, feminised and...
She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...
Your chef will be the first to saynot a muster of hair should remainas he timbers a fire, wide hands barb your fattened flesh. Thigh all manner of birds; you’re as light as a featherthick as a board. Resentful caretakersbreak their deer, unlacelegs, loosen fleshcleanly from each side of bone...
The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...
it used to be the world, singularsitting on your shouldersnow it’s each of youwe’ve become so individualized the frayed end of a tasseli don’t know who or what is the single thread holding ustogether at the top but it’s precarious, no i want to weave around younot the finesse of a...
you pull out your day book &inscribe a stellarium on my belly. posed with your phone like a byzantine sainti tilt the word of your miracles to better light. i’m drawing my gratitude list in stars, you saidlike you do. do you mind if i balance this here? i stretch exalted, the breathing altar on...
I. welcome to the good woman. welcome to my mother or my lover. welcome to knowing what will not save me. i want to be clean, washed of conditioning, and rub shampoo dry with the past as a patchwork towel i made from every mistake. i want to cry and not blame it on the aftershave. tomorrow i will...
My queer is naming…….my cabbage patch doll “Madison” after my very best friend. My queer is my neighbourhood. ……..The shootings. Our small blue house with the white……..balcony. The dog, bear, bit the nose……..off Madison. Bit the skin off me. My...
Flitting tails of firebow minnows— lilac fibrils streaked on wheelchair cobble— whipped by the warm pull of august a jug of orchids passes between palms their cups marrowed to bone, indecent gulping against the fold of dusk as if they have yet to live a life of tenderness ……..of shaking...
Please indicate the type of crime that occurred (e.g., home invasion, assault). What counts as a crime? What is the exact threshold? What specific dimensions of flesh delineate the parameters of abuse? He started at the feet and hands, and then the arms and legs; con-men know that the more times...
In summer the grass turned yellow & long, the light grew its leaves over my arm, we kept plants in the classroom, & once, a bunny rabbit. My mother said to bring it home, & there it stayed, till autumn fell upon our faces like the blood-salt of obligation. I & my sister wandered the...
Her eyes glow green under obsidian skies She gives the midnight cowboy a silver dollar and he hands her the elixir sealed with wax She tells me that life begins when you open your eyes in the morning She wants to show me the field where the wild horses run while their watcher sleeps Her eyes glow...
1. Write what you worry about on sticky notes. Throw them on the ground and draw a circle of water around them. Sprinkle salt onto the circle to light it on fire. 2. Start by texting, “I’m worried that…” in a message to yourself. Think about how sweet pecan pie is, and allow...
Pain thuds the drum before I leave the ear appointment, but the clinic staff wave me out the door. The throbs become thumps of bass through floor boards and I call 811, wincing against my pillow. The thumps release into fizzing, then sputtering I laugh off over tea and a roommate’s raised brow...
after Claudia Rankine / Today: You perch at your kitchen table, a swell of distraction surrounding your screen: discarded wristwatch, stained cotton wipes full of thick black nailpolish, your third pot of bitter tea. You click between determination and avoidance, between the crushing metronome of...
Today my mother sent me a framed picture of her heart,ladybug stickers in each corner. A chest preparing for new growth. I’m not sorry anymore that she doesn’t like her life. My poemsare dispirited by her, thick mentions of roadtrips, and landscapesand pissing into Lay’s Stax canisters while stuck...
There was no book on how to girl. I read all the books about animals at the library. When my mother gave me a book on puberty, I drew penises. I became track suits, jean jackets, short hair. My bones grew. In the city, I swirled caught without ponds, between asphalt and decay. My friends were boys...
I know you will make your own way in the world.The way you favour linen and leather, and walk like a boy.Your teeth are like pomegranate seeds, sucked clean.Your motorcycle helmet unleashes copper strands.You do exist. The way you bathed me in mud, adding champagne and orchids.I flogged you with...
There are tiny, quick spiders that live in my curtains. Sometimes they die, shrivelling in silk folds. I killed one once in a moment of fear, interrupting a key sequence of events, like the man who rescued a baby songbird that fell from a nest onto Queen Street, hand fed her mealworms and suet for...
I watch your mother stroll through her garden. She moves like you and I imagine us here together—years from now—harvesting sweet melons and mobola plums for our daughters. We follow her cautiously, just close enough to brush arms every third step. Wading in and out of the tide between us. There is...
CW: Mentions of suicide Look inside your skin. Reverse it, snake hide. Bubble wrap. A gift. Sifting darkness. Proposals. Threats. You cannot control. Look within your meat. The flesh, the blood. Hemoglobin you wish could clot. Sudden hypothermia. Induced CO. You learned to label monoxide in Chem...
And so this flaw within the silk of memory began to run— —John A. Scott, “Run in the Stocking” Rain boils. A liar wakes eating the down on her wrists. Failure, again, to alarm the eyes fast enough to shock unstalked world. At breakfast, she and her parents will share a bowl of loquats from the tree...
instead, the next time her mouth opens the snake-tongued road unrolls through it, past the groves inland, to Mount Ida.that morning, her brother cut songbirds plume to chin to cast their smooth crop stones, trace them like masts underwater. In turn they recounted their dreams: in hers a white...
in my marbled monokini I vein a new tract into yr comely cornea with my strong postured pubic stubble And it issues forth laws on street parking and winter bans, and its many exurban mothers band together to ban my locked-hip public self, my unnatural monumental stiff dance...
from lena to maribelle this is just to say that I have eaten the plums, en route from Georgia, pits and carmine juice spat on roadside dirt to pucker the ground, so sweet, so cold. Carrion for suckling mayflowers. You may have been saving them for breakfast, some decades past, the thrill of this...
is it sacrilegious to say i was horny for a thunderstorm?all day we sat on the beach of wâpamon sakahikan bodies burning on the beach foolish not to slather each other in sunscreen or admit our feelings for one another in june the sky is in transition above nehiyaw askîy it’s difficult to predict...
Liselle Yorke i put an entire nation into a cardboard boxhandled them with care down the basement stairsopened the last door for themthe last act of common decency i put them on the cold floor of the crawl spacetucked between winter gear and holiday lightsalongside seasons that have passedi leave...
Rob Colgate Finn drowned me he wanted to there’s nowhere to read this and my rubber filled with lungs pushed the stretch of my back thin water no I’m sorry white water yes it was less costly to sink the...
Samantha Sternberg Wafer paper and moonlightspread across the swept table.A fresh pen. Start at the waist. Hands on hips.The small-leaved lime treehad the greatest girth in Łódź, 2017. There must be enough to hold onto.Eat, eat. Few of her words I remember.Six years we shared. Zeyde stayed late to...
Aylin Malcolm Sell gender to the highest bidder. Curate crisis. Have graceless breakdownover plans made. Undothe bed, shiver. A day weighed downwith hashtags: new year, new war. Splinters of time and death, merepartitioning the river. Noone wanted this. We wantedto push...
Courtney Love on all night in his low attic roomtesting with toes, jokes that weren’t jokesand soon, the lingering hand— how I loved his lingering hand!Fingers in the boxer band, our hardness!I shook in the sheetsout of joy for him that night. The next morning was Lady Di’s funeraland we were up...
She asked me my feelings. Disclosure on demand. As though they could pile and inspect them. I couldn’t find any in my small square, the place where I store things. I must have put them in another box. I have since misplaced my scattered belongings. Luke Smith-Adams is a 32 year old living in...
Roxanna Bennett In Oxford on OxyContin, in Ajax on Ativan, in Paris on Percocets, in Cobourg on Clonazepam, in Switzerland on Seroquel, in Scarborough on Serentil, Berlin is a blur of Baclofen & Nabilone, Old Town is absinthe, Abilify & absence, Montreal is Mirtazapine, codeine &...
Jake Byrne My second boyfriend’s husband’s boyfriend pulls the page of cups I feel the only way I should: ecstatically We’ve put on the red light Concrete floor wet with verruca and lube A dampness on my perineum I composed this poem while David fucked me and apologized for not being fully present...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. Tharuna Abbu Day 1 the enemy is not the virus 3a Day 2 ...
Chelsea Lee Wood As if they knew our fear the crows made strange calls, their crackling laughter. And eagles flying overhead flaunting a catch we can’t make. Today, a bird that shall not be named calls, their laughter cracks us open. And eagles joining up three, now four, soon none. Today, a bird...
Michelle Poirier Brown Not just any so good. So good the way you say so good. The way you close your eyes and sink into your breath. The way you weep with me when I am happy. So good the way you greet your animals. So good the way you greet your tea. It’s infatuation. It always is. That adoration...
Elizabeth Mudenyo the way I keep coming back I’m sure a part of me has stayed at age 12 I walked gaze lowered until my best friend told me not to and looking back I want to unfurl my fingers bent on impossibility my head filled with futures for somebody else and their body I did the work of...
Joshua Wales You plead to see my toaster every day and I make you count down before I flip the camera round to let you see: Three-Two-One Toaster! Raise the stakes is rule one of distance cinema. It’s just a dented chrome four-slicer but you find in its regularity a precious metal that only a two...
Vicky Chen sharp knives in a kitchen cut from crisp asian pears and pickled radish stored in jars you promised could become more than glass prisons. turn back time, so you can ask me again: 你想吃什么? no shortage of berry, melon, spice from careful cupboards you have hidden loneliness in a place for...
K.S.Y. Varnam It’s like how I feel after too long in the country; there’s too much space between. I live in the city for the loud voices and the night chaos. I love trees and open fields and clean air, but I need the bustle of human lives around me too. I need graffiti in the back alleys behind...
David Ishaya Osu both tomorrow and the tomato will ripen into a song / no song is through with your body cry outside your robe will know why we laugh the boy and his ball lead inside, too i am too big for a ghost everyone faces the mirror and then says no, no, no David Ishaya Osu is a poet...
Jim Nason And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! The Whos would start singing! They’d sing! And they’d sing! And they’d SING! —Doctor Seuss From balcony and rooftop, from sidewalks and cars— bicycle and dinner bells, pot against pan, spoon against glass, clapping and whistles...
