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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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

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.

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ever since Ramona debuted her prosthetic leg at school, she’s walked the school halls with her head a little higher.

Was that season artery or vein? when the days stretched like Broadway, & the nights undid our shirts – the temperature so slight you could raise your arms in flight & feel nothing, the body as air. But there was also the need for hurt. And dusk: a ghost of a boy tempted to feel his weight, to put his palm to the depth, touch the pupil, the dead turbine of god’s one good cataracted eye.

a moon the size of Neptune / rising from the green muck like ectoplasmic / crossfire.

He had kept the bulk of his music library, which covered every genre from obscure Sub-Saharan drum tracks recorded on cell-phones to honey-tongued R&B to Norwegian black metal, in his parents' basement. It was the only place, he had argued, that could support the weight of it all.