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...
Katherine Abbass My roommate is a pilot; we watch the sky for signs of life. On warm days we sit out on the patio and stare at the stucco building beside us, our neighbour walking her iguana on the handrail, giving us a wave, a cigarette dangling from her winter lips, dry and scaly as her pet. My...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. Cecilia Stuart I put something down, you pick it up. I write theletter e and you pick it up. You go on waiting,waiting. I draw a barrier around myself. Closeenough for you to graze...
Lucas Crawford The swab isn’t sublingual after-all so for now my secret cure remains safe. He counted to three and went up my nose with a stick longer than the smallest dildo that my Montreal landlord stole. Great. Now I have a nasal fetish. Dare you to dig deeper than him and risk reaching the...
Tawahum Bige after Eve Joseph nipawatan wecîpweyânâhk nipihtos-mihko ewîkiyân tahtwayak ekwa âyiman I’m used to battlefield the way cannons fire and ancestors’ bones gather, just to shatter again. Dene rising are more story than poem— our throats carry cargo, long thought sunken...
Grace When my succulent began turning yellow, it dropped one fleshy leaf every day, indifferent to my panic until only the stem remained naked and alone. You could still see the hollows that were homes for phantomed limbs, where love [was] tried. * I call my plants my children and give them either...
Rob Colgate Staring out the drippy window. Wanna go to the top of the rock. So happy up there boy so happy so happy. Want the river up there with me. Wanna be alone. Not my boyfriend. Covered in slimy nacre so the dirt is worth it. All of this used to be colder. Rain on the fire escape, street...
Leslie Joy Ahenda the nice ones all got shot. a woman knots her fists & disregards her joints—swelling means her blood is not yet on pavement. in sleep a woman majesticizes a man unshackled. wakes to a man praying only for his brothers. please. nigga fronts like the lust in his eyes is a yellow...
James Collier cloud unsettling little winter, in April it is all local, grappling with small stakes and nothing real, Caeneus unknowable to the body I feel, glance down, glazed and terrible it is all so apathetic, the snow smothers what is not already home, and Caeneus, I am sorry, but the crush is...
Roxanna Bennett after “Bilingual Pathways” by Dominik Parisien In Paris the air tastes like pain, ancient, golden, Gauloises, Gitanes, paint the skin with guttersweat grease. I learn to limp through the Louvre, loving the Winged Victory of Samothrace...
Michael Russell I hold the last picture of you fold it into the pocket of my mouth, chew. Daddy, you taste like love and devastation. My teeth rip you the way you ripped yourself from me. In front of the bathroom mirror I ask Where is Stephen? The steam lifts like a bridal veil and I vomit the wolf...
Abryna Bulford Nigankwam held my hand When spring blues hit me. Sometimes things don’t disappear, But change into something better. And here I am, whole, as I always was. What gift was I to give you, I ask myself, besides healing? I could not do it all, but only enough. And that is enough, is it...
Joelle Barron “These Texas gals are passionate about God’s beautiful design for womanhood…” – Girldefined.com Blonde godheads, god girls, proselytizing YouTube doll babies. Their blog favicon a white-panty period stain. Sweet girls, what do they desire? Girldefined, ecstatic girl-tongue. Girl is...
Kyeren Regehr granting of a penny wish druthers something beloved Am truly all those hackneyed phrases shopworn and cloying unbelieving Am madly tripping light-headed fantastically smouldering the grass with each step...
Isabel Yang On our first date, I throw crumbs to water- fowl. She says bread makes birds sick, It’s like junk food for them. Don’t let them eat the crust. On our second date, he pushed fingers in, and I opened up, thinking it was the same anodyne reflection on...
Jade Wallace after Jean Day Ours is a generation of wistful and somewhat attractive humans, wanderers in a bad and beautiful slough. We say that all we want are convincingly unisex jackets but what we mean is that we are tired of bitter butterfinger metaphysics, bored of biding our time in the...
Karine Hack Mashup of Ocean Vuong’s “homewrecker” & Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler” when we swam once, white dresses spilling from our feet / in water, late August our mothers / left with no trace your father’s tantrum turned, turning our hands dark red as if wounded: a wildfire we...
David Ly Too many men are too afraid to be tender, too raw. My love makes me fearless with fangs and a flickering tongue plucked from a king cobra. I match the wildness someone else wished into you until you were abandoned. Nothing between us is forbidden, too much, too scary. Your harpy talons...
Annick MacAskill The universe gets a little heavy-handed when you’re around—the Bow still green all these kilometers down river; two geese and their tuft of fledgling: proof that the universe was once the size of a gumball. Time is a rubber band, we joke. Nothing like looking over and seeing you...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. James Collier anonymous bumps in the darkwe body and couple and bodywestrict structures just too tired forwe send lovlies thatwe wont see spoken heardwe dig our hands into groinwe find ...
Zoë Johnson I dunno When I talk about my gender, I always end up leaning s i d e w a y s My vertebrae begin to bend into the shape of the word sorta See, I’ve been trying to solve the equation Of internal chickness and dude-ittude for years But when I try plotting the data points the...
A. Light Zachary A movie called Alien vs. Predator in which we go back in time to fight everyone who hurt us when we were young. A movie called Cowboys vs. Aliens about watching our backs at the club. A movie called Village of the Damned about our neighbourhood. A version of Invasion of the Body...
D. Simon Turner The scariest part was that they liked you, making jokes about the dick you don’t have. And there were some days you’d rather not sit with them at 9am “lunch,” congregating with the regularity of high-school cafeterias. Like the day when, each time you stood, you glanced at your...
Matthew Walsh Still feel the nerve in my neck snap back at me, injury from when I fell down the stairs of the Embassy, stairs now vibrant with exes orange and aquarium light. If I was floating in the galaxy with fresh new stars when they put me in the tube shoot me to the moon my brain will appear...
Griffin Epstein my advice to future parents is be careful when you turn the bed notice who hears the argument...
Alix Wood For months, we’ve planned to visit the New England Aquarium, where a new shark exhibit has opened. An open tank allows me to stick my hand in cold water and let it float, waiting for sharks the length of thigh bone to emerge from faux coral and swim. You watch me as a thin body crowds my...
Dominik Parisien My body is a spaceship designed to optimize the proliferation and growth of its microbial cosmonauts. -Adam Dickinson The myth of body is this impermeable place this state of being never porous when the...
Tracy Wai de Boer if we’re counting i’d count for half they tell me what i am basically white basically meaning, not quite but almost close they tell me what i am does not exist because there’s no such thing as what i am they say, if they believed in gay or straight then i’d be just...
Sophie Crocker slim and strong as a samurai, you wash socks in our frequently broken kitchen sink. you say, as if citing the weather, murder rate escalating – must be the summer heat. i hold your hips between my hands. you feel so narrow and brief i ache when i touch you, ache when i don’t...
Aris Keshav Lines of sun-bright lesbians perched in café windows follow me with glint-glint eyes making smooth supervision of Saint-Viateur. I bask then traipse the corner, waverly with happiness. Here are black-pants men all elegance as they maneuver violin cases from a pick-up truck (everything...
