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There’s no one here to take an unguarded photo of me biting on a hangnail while staring at the screen working out a better word for ‘broken.’

Instructions: Find a path from the beginning article to the ending article using only article links.

That gruesome adolescent heartbreak you go through again and again and again and then evolves into real heartbreak, the kind you can’t just shrug off as kid feelings. It starts here.

It's that country near the bottom of the Earth, the one that only comes up in the news when we owe someone else billions or when people find out our president's son is a drag queen which is genuinely one of our greatest and only sources of pride.

loved not be loved not be loved

“Why can’t a nice-looking girl like you act nice,” the principal asked.

A couple of cards, a 4 and a King, lay on the green felt in front of you. You clutch a cup of coffee with your left hand. There’s a stack of casino chips in your right. You're shuffling the chips over and over.

If I keep your poetry, / And I'm killed, / Will I be buried with it?

Who sings honeyed dirges for the dead while their warm hands make love with someone else’s warm hands?

Sorrow a monotonous tune, like the weeping of this lonesome cunt. I cry because I am two hours behind his time zone always, and maybe that means I am also two hours behind grieving us always.

Sea otters shivering, succumbing to the cold without the properties of their insulating fur, lifeless paws slipping from each other’s grasp. Dolphins scattered, bursting like smooth grey fireworks away from the foul stench that permeated the water.

at fifteen the intake nurse clacked her nails until / social phobia, ED-NOS appeared beside diagnosis

But every day we also hoped something would change, that our Mortuary House would have dainty laced curtains and a round table in the center draped in white table cloth.

What if...?

Living is like a turtle shell growing around a plastic bag

in an ancestral language i never learnt

I write creative nonfiction, and that means that I lay in your arms and think about how I would describe it, our bodies next to each other in the dark while it storms outside, how I ask you to leave the fan off so we can hear it.

I am here because I can’t sleep when it’s dark, / maybe in an hour I will be tired.

I survived a knife between my ribs, / strings cutting into sponge-berry flesh, / blooming rose wound around my wrists.

You heard it’s best to step away from it for a while. You decide to let the story rest for a few days/weeks/months. It sounds like you deserve a break, anyway; you watch as your computer switches off.

Hearing about another extinct species, I do a line of hope

Long spidery clockwork orange lashes and you hate to be shushed like that by your mum or other grown-ups or anyone. And you will still not know what sex is for years, years after you did it even.

CW: Mentions of Suicide

i will take your hand. / smooth my thumb over the callouses / liver-spotted, amber nails cracked from worried teeth

Now he’s LA and airplanes and travels a lot. In high school Dane was “I don’t want anyone to know we’re related if you talk about church stuff” and “you can’t say that here.”

I cannot fathom sitting alone in a restaurant with a horde of costumed men breathing down my neck, pitying the lone eater, wondering how fast I will empty the table for a group of noisy jobless rich brats who would order five times more and tip a little too generously.

where do we go, where do we belong

Love At First Like / FIND TRUE LOVE / talk about sex

men aren’t supposed to bleed.

There is almost no reason to make gazpacho at any other time of the year. Try to make this with winter grocery store tomatoes and it’ll be like drinking a Michelob Ultra instead of an actual beer.

I bring...

Just before midnight, my cousin, her owner, is asleep at a hotel in Florida that does not allow dogs, but is so luxurious that she would leave Holly in New Jersey under the care of a 21 year old.

Prometheus hadn’t seen a son so close in eons. He spoke words from Armenia, a tongue which demanded much from the throat.

delicious / on sunday / afternoons.

2am toilet bowls: / the stars whipping / cartwheels off;

I swam. I dove under, let go of the float and remembered my body. I’ve been obsessed with invertebrates and wanted to be spineless. I came back to the surface and swam to the concrete retaining wall at the edge of the lake to pull myself out of the water.

There were sympathetic yawns; everyone had heard all this before.

Perhaps it is my subconscious telling me to die in the pines and the snow, better than to die alone in the root cellar, where tossed-out tools are ornaments that shine and sing.

Oh, fuck, will there be guns!

within me, maybe, when mother asked where did this all start?

Tell me where to go, what to do / when I get there. Just bring me / best practice, nothing that will blur

I love you, Harry. And I’m excited that we can be married for most of our lives. What does that mean, though, when we can already love each other for most of our lives whether the government is involved or not.

In the spaces between the two of you, I snuggle up for comfort.

when every night terror wakes / and feeds on the ice / unchecked in your veins

Military or / off-world / secret, perhaps.

‘I’m a freak, I'm a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here, I don’t belong here’ -Creep, Radiohead 1992

The phantom trapped inside appeared before the critic on his couch and offered him the customary three wishes.

I’d stolen it accidentally when I lived across from LA City College from in front of an ostentatious antiques store two blocks from my studio, a dingy shop I supposed was in foreclosure but was actually holding an outdoor sale.

the old dental assistant asks if i want dentures before thirty

after Megan Fernandes

“I know those guys,” my father would say. “They’re just a glorified referral service.”

A bunch of text, on a forum post or in an email, telling the reader they had four minutes to send the letter to ten people or else they would drop dead in a week. And other multitudinous variations.

All miracles can be explained through standard deviation.

Is there a difference between sonar and bad vibes?

Chester was more of a Nietzsche dog, believing hope is for losers.

For the rest of his life, he’ll tell people this was the first Super Bowl he remembers.

A red brick wall, the ground along it lined / with chips of brick; how came they in those piles?

I have no idea how / I should be taking those words now,

Anyway, I decided that this was the year I’d get a proper winter jacket again.

The dog knows to curl up behind a chair or slip under the bed. But the man and the bag fill the space between the dog and chair.

you can't see me

I also want to ask if it knows / what a road is. If it ever actually / knows where it’s going. Or why

The trick is to pick articles that are destined for spammy blogs. They don’t care about quality and they usually come with a list of keywords that need to be stuffed into 250 words of content.

Dear Lord, / I ask not for / riches or wealth,

ALEXA! CONTINUE RECORDING!

CW: animal death, cannibalism, violent imagery

The lake’s schedule was more fluid, / naturally, but we squeezed in the time,

But I told this car full of friends this truth I’d never even spoken to myself.

The doctor says I won’t have many changes since I’ve been on hormones for so long, but still—

Uhhh anyone else see this article?

It wasn't your liver, though we had bets whose was worse. The odds always in favour that you’d never go first. It wasn't your heart though it's been broken many times. And it wasn’t your sugar from drinking outside the lines.

This year a group of teenagers has joined in the occasion, a mix of locals and foreigners. They parade amongst the younger children wearing lurid rubber masks: lolling tongues and murderous grins.

And there's so little time to / even consider it with all of the / living we need to take care of.

I just wanted to tell you that the kind stranger who held my hair back at the end of the night got quite a mouthful about how lovely I think you are.

And in the daydream, he smiles, he smiles big and a lot, he's happy, I can't believe how happy, over such small things, and he says, that's cool, oh that's cool too, oh that's so cool...

I think it's more likely I'll scoop up stones & save them in my shoes

after Bobby Darin's 'Mack the Knife' & Nina Simone's 'Pirate Jenny'

There were many things that I might have said, that I would have liked to have said …

She climbed onto the back of one, shouting something about becoming a “spring break legend.”

the honesty of that gives me / a peach pit in my stomach / a teardrop in / my throat

The first thing that Selma saw in her Art and Architecture classroom was a shakily drawn peace sign on the blackboard. “Peace for Fredonia,” it read, just as shakily, underneath.

Miles Davis lived around the block from me / deep in the upper west side of Manhattan island.

I’ve never felt so emotionally close to an ice-cream. This remarkable feat from a loaded cone demanded my respect. Reaching out, my finger touched the melting solution that had crossed its great divide.

seven galaxies over —they are interstellar / radio savvy, in the very least. And yeah, / they’ve been in contact for about two years,

Not just a memory, but / an invisible & teeming / with life magnetic field,

CW: Sexual Violence

When the mailman came pedaling by on his 3-wheel cargo bike, Wilhelmina poked her head out of the dormer window, and in her cheeriest sing-song voice issued a hellooo-oo. When he looked up, she gave the queen’s wave.

Later, while I’m telling Jamie the story of how Dad chopped his toe off, I get two texts from Dad’s phone. The first one is an overexposed close-up of a pearl white bone surrounded by what looks like gray and white chicken flesh. The second text says: “This is my toe.”

Wind bristles my bones as I shiver through our vacant city.

Her parents discussed it. Cried. Discussed it again. Her mother said she’d like to read Jennifer at least once.

as if she’s speaking to you directly

Have you ever held Death’s hand? I have. I have pulled it to my cheek and told it to slap. Stupid girl, brilliant bones. Feel it. Feel it!

“I always knew my son was too good for public school,” his mother would say at the dinner table. “He doesn’t need to squabble with the riffraff in California."

We were trying to make our way back / To the subway before sunset.

No darker brew can flow / Than moonless thunder sting / Of rites which echo might.

Inspired by research conducted by the Georgia State University Neuroscience Institute

I was dancing around to Fearless and / Glee when eyes were set on me. At nineteen,

I lounge over these Victorian banisters while old family / secrets burst through every hinge in the house.

Your arms are sloppy around his veiny orange neck. They say the juice heads do it best, but he wouldn’t even pay for your funnel cake...

My transparent invitations via pop songs shouted hoarse/ summarized my status as an ill-tuxedoed groom

All I want is you (and me and everything.)

The driver goes—YOU NEED MORE CHANGE!

you say i’ll go first if you promise to save me if i fall.

sunken as a memory in the ember sunset / in that small place subliminal space in your head

And for two more days the rescuers try to drag out / the grey giant with ropes — to no avail.

The wedding planner skirts around him, out of the radius of his thrashing. She doesn’t have time to fight his hands away and explain that she’s not his bride.

Here old ladies brush their teeth with Desitin. Men step on the toes of priests. Strangers elbow strangers, their arms swinging back-and-forth like bells in a grandfather clock.

I’m molding a mask for myself out of aluminum foil.

after "Song for Sad Girls" by Kim Addonizio

The gentleman in the chair stood up, paid, and breezed by Avery on his way out. They shook their hair off their face and made their first eye contact with the barber.

A visual poem

it is more warm than fireside / eyes shining orange and soft, /

Doubtful the landlord knows you’re taking down walls.

The man, not yet having nothing left to live for, agrees that the next such sucking candy he consumes will be the last;

“Cut it out. You and I both know you don’t have a revolutionary bone in your body, not to mention the fact that, as a lover, your lack of creativity is matched only by your lack of ambition.”

It was so sad to see those large horseshoes / dangle. Dogs I’ve seen and cats I see most.

My dog greets me at the door.

Coconut curry and / Sticky rice / Have healed / Our wounds

That's odd, too. Your parents don't go out in winter. You pick up whatever they need.

From EAST COAST BLUES via Bottlecap Press (2022)

The first time I was misgendered was at a Taco Bell in Crossgates Mall in upstate New York. Or rather, this is the first time I specifically remember being misgendered.

An erasure from “Welcome to Earth” by Sturgill Simpson (A Sailors Guide to Earth)

An erasure from “Brace For Impact (Live A Little)” by Sturgill Simpson (A Sailors Guide to Earth)

A découpé poem after Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to the Earth (2016)

one by one, I unhooked joints and / rearranged them at my feet in the living room.

*i wasn’t sure how to form / an opinion, so i decided to / watch some YouTube videos / to see if they could show me how.

incidentally, I wonder if any animal could actually take residence on my patio once my sister sends her furniture over.

Select all squares with empathy

You’re a little more into iCarly than your peers, for a lot longer than them, too. You find yourself in the iCarly fandom, reblogging posts at a rate that loses you followers.

You recite his lyrics like they are a prayer, like it’s not a coincidence FOB has the same amount of letters as GOD.

When I was a kid, one of my special interests was Old Hollywood. This was my parents’ fault for allowing me exposure to the genre.

I never / had. Big sweaters, / bigger glasses, / a patriarch.

He was like a man but not quite. He was a fictional character that vanished from my view when I pressed “stop” or “eject.” In this way, he was better than a man.

The bourgeois adores the anti-bourgeois.

It was like I was faking an accent.

Chaos, / encountered / unaware,

The phantoms in the streetlight had returned to their posts. The ghost of her father hung in her mind. The 7/11 was open for snacks.

In their rejection letter for my article--Dispatches of Haywire Ray, the biography and reflections of the titular illusionist--the Editor of Hocus Opus Press denounced my work as “a pure work of imagination,”

We wait in the car while the engine purrs / and I shiver in my Woody sweater / like it’s raining outside

The father stares down ten-year-old Darien. The boy rises and walks to the corner to wait for the light, then steps into the street and picks up the bottle. He brings the bottle back to his father.

Moving house is moving between / pockets of time and space

I sip my drink and read a book. The drink is fruity, over sweet, and alcoholic -- I hate drinking in the daytime, but I am on vacation and play the part. The book, it’s okay. If nothing else, it shades the irksome sun from my face.

He ignored his customers’ penetrating glares and sly whispers and began stacking cage eggs.

who retreats?

there are no giants / there are no talking fish / there is no megalodon, / the dream is over.

Droplets of sweat and rain threaded through the front of his hair as he blinked through the white lights in the front of the restaurant towards the large faux-rock counter.

Trans culture is finding an old t-shirt / from your bottom drawer, / and immediately putting it back / to avoid a weird nostalgic feeling.

We collect symbols and consume symbols and sometimes are consumed by symbols.

— after The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

may you hunt me like a standoff of village

“For those of you who did arrive on time” he paused shooting Terence a glance, “the meeting today will be hideously punctuated by the untimely death of our colleague Terence. We are expecting the incident about halfway through the meeting, agenda item five.”

Spent so much time at work this week

Scant seconds to right / Before the video clock start

You’re not sure if you’re sleepy or uncomfortable, if your heart is stopping every few seconds by your hand or hers, there is something rotten about being mortal and even this crush-love—

freedom from a false sense of connection

healing the land will not come from working beyond our means

I found myself somewhere between pleasure and fear. Surely that unflinching stare was searching for the very essence of my soul.

Last Wednesday, there she was, sitting in the corner by the $675 splattered paint on wall by local artist installation when she saw it, approaching from the entrance and using the handicapped button to help it because without muscles it no longer had a strong grip.

First, take the brown vase / take the one close to it too, the vase with oriental motifs

“Remind me again why you’re writing a burn piece about yourself.”

other title ideas included / Fear and Railing in New York / Getting Railed on a Hammock

viva la punk / viva el diablo / somewhere havin a laugh / they say god hates rock n roll / that’s ok because rock n roll hates god

The two detectives in front of me looked at each other, as if having a private conversation, and then back at me. The detective on the left, Detective Dowdy, leaned back in his seat and squinted. The disbelief in his eyes is clear.

Borderline broadcast / crocheted - haphazardly / by grandma’s arthritic fingers.

At night I can feel my dreams crawl out and inject themselves into your side, I can feel the veins of the pillows pulsing through to each other.

It’s so easy to have this idea of yourself and then not really live up to it.

The times were far from happy, but they were stable and predictable in their badness, and that was almost good, in its own way.

There’s a cockroach wiggling in, above, and behind-below my gut

I do miss that sky.

This is not Apple Strudel’s first showing. She’s been shown from the Milky Way to the Pisco Nebula.

Love is a memory. Love is a memory that’s present, / A memory not resolved, not passing into past,

All through winter life burnt; all through spring. / Autumn, a spoke on the same wheel, will repeat

The fire danced, made the shadows quiver. The pile of mail, the letter opener on the cabinet, the single bookshelf: all creeping in at the edges of the darkness.

you can never be an ocean / if you’re afraid to make waves

Home plate the man hole cover / Pitcher’s mound that line of orange spray paint

“What Should we do with the body?”

It bifurcated at the chin and it bulged at the cheeks. It certainly did look like the objects being mimed.

Behind your grandfather's credenza / I found a photograph,

Periodically, I've wanted to extend my youth, / When all the magic seemed to lose its spark,

Eventually the two put their finger guns away as if it had been a draw as each one backed away to different sides of the room.

Trouble was, there was a lot of trouble. Questions I didn’t understand, even though I worked there. A month or so before, I’d run into a group of art-school people sitting together around the curve of a bar, nice people, friendly.

There has been silence in the car for much of the hour-long drive. You have been mostly present but what is there to say. Honey, I'm sorry that I wrapped the car around a tree and for the last few weeks I've been a vegetable doesn't seem to cut it.

Blood showers on hot tin roof / Cain kills Abel to / Tenth Avenue jazz band tune / Blood mingles with sidewalk / Mingles with dandelion

I say my goodbyes to my parents and my sister. I expect you to pat my back, but instead you pull me into a hug and I breath in the aftershave you have recently started using. I want this moment to be the start of a love story.

CW: Hospital Imagery

Is this a Copperhead?

I measure the rest of the time in empty envelopes / and the mechanic whirring of a fleet of slicing jaws. / There are only so many ways to spell cancel, and I’ve seen them all.

I walked into Mr. Pfloe’s office and sat in the chair facing his desk. I could feel his eyes on me as I smoothed my skirt over my legs.

there’s so many options / all of the classics are there / pong, pacman, and others / but you decide to go with / tic tac toe / (your personal favorite)

Names are meaningless. They just hide the nothingness from us for a little while.

A student gave me Superman’s cape, a parting gift when leaving my class. I put it on to pick my daughters up, watched it flutter a little in the wind and I guess the glasses pull together the whole Clark Kent look. The little one sucks on the corner

It might only be a 20 dollar hunk of cardboard from Target, but we threw it together in about half an hour with the proper A1 flap into the proper A1 slot and with a little coloring it’s a regular food truck slinging whatever we have on tap for

CW: Drug Use

CW: Graphic Violence

Do the macarena, the cupid shuffle, the hoedown throwdown,

I wish I could tell him of the benefits of birding.

remember years ago / it feels like a multiverse

CW: Alcohol Abuse

Now please move that finger from the center of my left palm to the middle of my open wrist. This was the first movement you ever did when I met you standing at the bar like Samson.

I loaded the tape into the VCR. It didn’t need to be rewound.

A Collaborative Poem

If camping seaside & reading poetry & smoking comically large cigarettes is going Le Fou count me gone

CW: Drug Use

CW: Homophobia

what must kill you the most is that you know this

I liked to think that my spontaneous combustion was due to God not liking me very much

It’s not enough to make it through the day

Almost gnat-like—this annoyance of flesh, this cicada sound between bones.

Honk if you love me—honk like you mean it.

“But this is a handful, right? It fits in my hand.”

I'm going to listen to that Neyo song, because for some reason it always makes me feel better.

“But we’re dog people, Qiptyn.” Bathory’s vocal fry made the statement sound whinier than it was. “Emoji deserves the best.”

We’d met the night before at a Meetup group for shy people. She told me she was Nigerian, just passing through, wanting to escape the punishing heat of her hometown and a family trauma.

Did you notice / how long I lingered, / my nose pressed against your neck,

“All those injuries, man. I can’t believe all those injuries. Think they can pull it out?”

(just policy) (station whistle) (loser diction)

My child, my child, my child, My child, My child, there are bobcats hiding

Still, you are caught in Mike Osterman’s gravitational pull, like so many others.

They want to know if Doug has a message for its devoted followers, if it’s a force of good or evil, if it has chosen Gerard as its prophet.

It’s as if landlords looked at that vitruvian man n’ decided / that every body has a one-track-mind. The golden ratio is just ur shitty prop;

Violet knew the secret of the gods and why they are gods

by Sean Ennis It is true that there are too many guitars in this world, all the strumming and plucking. Grace puts on Lee Montgomery or Bob blabbermouth Dylan and it’s like she’s trying to hurt my feelings. “This is American music,” she says. We’re sort of

the worst thing about cleaning is you always have to clean

in the livingroom i thought it was the coolest thing i’d ever seen

At the trial, the convict’s mother, who wished to retain her dignity, sat stone-faced while the court pronounced her youngest son’s fate: first-degree murder, 30 years to life.

except it was there. Injury / happened to other people, / but I never gave it much thought.

The worst part is / I signed up for this, / and keep coming back for more.

Another wood knock. Hard to tell how far away, or even from which direction. The scene is an inversion now.

A baseball, on the other hand, is something everyone can agree on.

Ranging from ecstasy to dampened mood

Life is a party so let’s make the most of it

It’s the first time in three months I’ve heard so much English, and between the bull and the barbeque, I can almost mistake it for home.

There was comfort in all these things, like I was placing my isolated act of snacking in my recliner, alone in a small room, into a framework of collective experience.

Of course, the entire Council, as a whole, was disgusted by Mrs. Cartwagon’s obvious lack of concern for the law, but we decided to let that go so that we could hear the rest of the story.

If you find a doorknob in the trash...

“Gay sex, by definition, is transgressive.”

A visual poem by Jill McCabe Johnson - "The body is a situation" Melissa Mathewson

A visual poem by Jill McCabe Johnson

I didn’t know I’d had a heart attack until the morning after, once the stent was in and I’d had a good night’s sleep flat on my back with a weighted pillow on my upper thigh where the surgeon cut into my femoral artery.

CW: talk of muscles and bones, dysphoria

CW: fire/smoke, death, religious trauma

“My Stuff Out in Tucson” is an eerie foreshadowing of the events that unfold in the writer’s forthcoming novel, Good-Bye, Lo Siento. You can follow him on Twitter at @lakemarkham for updates.

Late again, amid a forgotten torrent of bleach

Everyone knows the heart pumps blood in

Grown-ups were always telling us to make a wish; when blowing out our birthday candles, when finding a four-leaf clover, when snapping the wishbone on the chicken after Sunday lunch.

“i’m old fashioned”

“Anthony, look what I found.” Tara’s kid shakes me awake. When I turn my head, particles of sand come unstuck from my face. “It’s beach glass, right?”

Because what does it mean anyway

Of all the animals in the Mojave Desert, the desert cottontail is among the more overlooked.

When I find Rumphous, two miles outside of town, he has devoured a family of cats and is growling at a boy and his dad, who are locked in their car, too scared to get out.

Overnight, we are spring again.

the articulated skeleton / of the rooster with / his boiled chest,

Mask, shirt, sweatshirt, pants, socks, shoes, each a different shade of black. Sheet music. Clarinet. Bass clarinet. Backup reeds and backup reeds and backup reeds. Unnecessary pencil.

“We’ve got to clean up the garbage,” she says.