Back then I was taking Estazolam. It had brought along bothersome but tolerable side effects. For the whole day I was clumsy and unsteady, and at night I'd hold the tablet pack tightly, unable to …
The books feel farther apart on my nightstand; the tub has shouldered open, wide enough now for two; space seems to have grown between the sugar and creamer on the breakfast table, and despite the …
The boys are dancing. They prance around the dark stage in matching white shirts, striking a pose with their pale arms and pale necks. Seven cookie-cutter boys toss back their hair—bangs just …
I am the woman who the writer could not earn enough money to see. He never finished the stories, nor the political articles. He never arrived on the train, we never stayed at the hotel. We were …
When someone asks me what I do for a living, I give a different answer every time.
Singing always ended with a death in this house.
At the end of our fourth date, Amy and I have our first kiss. SEVENTEEN’s “Left / & Right” autoplays on YouTube in the background.
I dream that Hoseok is my bus driver. We hightail a heist at the British Museum, returning stolen art to their rightful owners.
Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
The Stonewood mall in the late-1980s had been a site of several aspirational misfires to fit in, be seen.
She worked in a supermarket before Showing women the way to the leeks, soaking the mop, affixing stickers to the cheeks of apples
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 …
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 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.
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 …
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 …
His beard uncombed / as starlight. His crime couldn’t sing / without a tongue
a man gives just enough / to thunderous applause / and we made a statue/ of it.
I loosen my hair in the morning, tap brainwaves, / uncork the fog, unveil a map of winter roads.
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