I stand at the crossroads of opportunity and transformation, bracing myself to e… Nicole Adabunu needs your support for Help Martins Deep Pursue His MFA Dream

I Our mid-afternoon rendezvous With Germanic efficiency Comes as a relief, a respite From Italian relaxation. Forget the authenticity Of being somewhere different! Just once, we want to be greeted …

Does it hurt you? / Does it make you bleed? / Yes—then this, too, / is a birthright. / You want to be great so achingly: you think thorn-adorned ladder rungs are / something like an inheritance, or…

Right now, an octopus is staring at an abandoned snorkel off the coast of Mozambique. Right now, precedented times are waiting in the wings to make a comeback. Right now, the stars can be forgiven …

I had been thinking, earlier, about transience. Not in a metaphysical way, but in relation to love. I’m not talking about short-lived romances or one-night stands. I’m talking about tho…

Elle was told he was a supreme artist and a very old man. That he ate mainly sweets with his mom dead. You’ll behave, her mother said as she brushed Elle’s hair and wiped a smudge of ja…

All stories are lies. Even the true ones. Especially the true ones. The right words cast at the wrong moment catch no fish. But let’s pretend there were never any fish in the first place; let…

i’m still right here. i’m still right here and so is my hair, just the way i want it. it falls, willowy, plain, at my feet. i could dream again, i dream about living. i could write agai…

In my other life the nickel and animal guts don’t grow dusty. They resound through the firs and fill the cool mountain morning with the gospel of my temple, my solitary practice, my unknown s…

We are sitting in your father’s car and he is driving me home. We are holding hands, taking pictures, making heart shapes for the photo album not yet made. You hum that one song from a couple…

i left my heart in singapore eight years ago, in the airport with the giant trees. no one can get through to me the way a city can. an endless ocean of sidewalk that’s not gum-stained is kind…

My father swam against the ocean’s seams, his hairy arms nothing more than noodles slapping the horizon. I had such terror watching him. I stood where the water spit and sucked sea treasures—…

one leads the other follows and I forget to breathe in the hollow pause between one pleading and the other appeasing between verse and refrain their song sings me open then breathes me closed again…

Sometimes at night I have no plans. Sometimes at night I recall purchasing clam chowder from a food truck at an autumn fair. Sometimes at night I leave catnip on the fire escape where a coon cat na…

let’s eat cake, she sings with a face full / of powder as i partition the mousse into sixths / & lick sugar off the knife / plastic stiff against skin / lipstick staining the edge. / her …

i miss the way you talk how the articulate words would fall loosely off your thoughtful tongue like wooden blocks dropped from the kitchen table hitting the tile floor with a soft clink one syllabl…

We are friends still & I remember you teething through me As if we were lovers And we still couldn’t help ourselves So we were reminded that Not everything feels like Something else Like …

lying on hot turf in the summer after track practice, the sun is blessing my skin dark. birthdays when i have forgotten and someone else has remembered. birthdays when i have forgotten and someone …

I. It is the middle of March. The seasons are straddled in between the taper-out of winter and the easing- in of spring. You are on the rooftop at night when you realize there used to be a third, m…

The bed is full, craving for more. The windows can see Andromeda, once again, spinning ancient stars. We are bloated of each other, nourished by trauma & afflictions. I love how despondency swe…