KARAOKE


Leandra Michaels 1

Brandon Young

You can believe it or not, all of this / heartbreaking / drag


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

Tender Raging Love: A Requested Playlist

Kathy Nguyen

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

Pop Song

Chen Chen

Love is an improbable / shaking / of hips / on a dancefloor called Nevertheless,

recipe for lifelong homosexuality

Chen Chen

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

Pretty Kitty

Dayna Cobarrubias

All she wanted was to look like all the other brown girls. They were everywhere, versions of the girl she’d prayed to look like in high school. Girls whose bodies and faces she craved. Girls she wished she could be. Girls her mom hated that she resembled.

Two poems from Cosmic Bottom

Lucas de Lima

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

Out of Time

Nancy Cook

He left the door unlocked, in case I arrived before he got back from teaching. I thought I’d timed the drive from Durham to ensure an appearance well after school let out, but he didn’t answer when I knocked and it was quiet and dim in the apartment.

harry styles live on tour, september 20th 2017, 8pm the greek theater, los angeles california

alexis briscuso

a man gives just enough / to thunderous applause / and we made a statue/ of it.

Leandra Michaels 1

Brandon Young

You can believe it or not, all of this / heartbreaking / drag

The Years Before Y2K

Raquel Gutiérrez

The Stonewood mall in the late-1980s had been a site of several aspirational misfires to fit in, be seen.

Left & Right

Monica Kim

At the end of our fourth date, Amy and I have our first kiss. SEVENTEEN’s “Left / & Right” autoplays on YouTube in the background.

Queer Paranoia at the Dua Lipa Concert

Kurt David

I vaguely knew about Dua Lipa before I saw her in concert: pop star, Albanian, that hit single with Da Baby. Mostly I’d come to associate her with my friend Isaiah.

Turn Around

Celeste Amidon

She worked in a supermarket before Showing women the way to the leeks, soaking the mop, affixing stickers to the cheeks of apples

Celebration

tae min suh

On the eve of Phoenix’ 23rd birthday, we sing, all the / furniture pushed up against the balloon-adorned walls of / their living room, the New York kind, compact, quaint a / broker might say when he is trying to sell this fantasy.

MMMBop was released

Ayelet Amittay

His beard uncombed / as starlight. His crime couldn’t sing / without a tongue

Dreaming in Kpop Y/N

Monica Kim

I dream that Hoseok is my bus driver. We hightail a heist at the British Museum, returning stolen art to their rightful owners.

filth deposition, with lines from Caroline Polachek

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

What I Wouldn't Give

Laura Dzubay

In Delaware Water Gap, I met a stranger I’d been looking for since Georgia. We both stayed the night in town, at a donation-based hostel in the basement of a church.


From the Archives

Return

Karla Clark

Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang along

Edward Robinson and the Legends of Jerusalem’s Springs

Robbie Maakestad

At the eastern edge of the City of David archaeological site in Jerusalem, a staircase drops into a cave where the naturally pulsing Gihon Spring burbles up from a bedrock crack. The water runs into a narrow tunnel leading deep within the earth, directly beneath the ruins of the ancient city.

Let’s Play College

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

With the p.t. on the first day

Kevin McIlvoy

Could I not want / the justice and / the sentence and / the jail of a goal?