{ Words by Megan Fernandes, from "Fabric in Tribeca," in Good Boys / Silas Melvin, from "Twenty," Grit }
we're not kids anymore.

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Origami Around
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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{ Words by Megan Fernandes, from "Fabric in Tribeca," in Good Boys / Silas Melvin, from "Twenty," Grit }
Lost by Kayla Renee
Sitting alone in an Elysian wood
One could live this way eternally
Instead we live the way we “should”
Pulled out of our arcane reverie
I wish to live in extreme delight
Ruled only by my passions
Yet I find myself consumed by night
With Death as my temptation
Strip me of this abnormality
Death alone I do worship-
He feeds into my carnality
For me- I am the serpent
Society I long to evade
Wishing to remain away in paradise
My body may decay
For my mind- It’s worth the sacrifice
Kaveh Akbar, from "Tassiopeia," in Calling a Wolf a Wolf
richard siken, the language of birds / rae armantrout, prayers
[Text ID: The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear : that something does.
The fear / that all this will end. / The Fear / that it won't. /End ID]
— rhythmicrhinoceros
E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962
Audre Lorde, “Digging.” The Black Unicorn
What Sex Becomes
by Olivia Gatwood
I remember being a waitress on Valentine’s Day and loving the newness on a couple’s face,
how I watched, like the only patron at a matinee, as they shared everything they ate.
I would deliver their sundae with an extra cherry – the one she would slide into her mouth – a preview of what was to come.
I felt like a school teacher who goes home to no children, a cab driver without a car,
a therapist who cries in the middle of the night and can’t figure out why.
journal
I don't know why this is so funny to me.
That I almost died this morning, actually.
And... this place lives on.
It's funny how much the world really doesn't revolve around me.
I'm glad it doesn't!
I don't mind at all.
I am just in a strange mood.
It was just a near car crash, I'm ok.
PLEASE DO NOT TAG AS YOUR OWN OC OR PAIRING.
Nathan and Ruben share a bond more powerful than most; mutual understanding through past experiences no one should ever have to go through, and through past actions so horrible they cannot be spoken of. Their grief and the blood on their hands binds them to the STEM technology they created, which has alienated them from the rest of the world— but they give each other the comfort they have both longed for so desperately for years, and that is all they need. They are each other's counterpart; you cannot imagine one without the other, like two sides of the same coin. Through their pain, their grief, their desire, and their regret, they have become one.
anna akhmatova, the guest // bones; equinox // 'i won't become' by kim jakobsson // agustín gómez-arcos, the carnivorous lamb // by oxy // achilles come down; gang of youths // czeslaw milosz, from 'new and collected poems: 1931-2001' // 'extended ambience portrait from a resonant biostructure' and 'migraine tenfold times ten' by daniel vega // a little death; the neighbourhood // marina tsvetaeva, from 'poem of the end' // by drummnist // katie maria, winter // 'nocturne in black and gold the falling rocket' by james abbott mcneill whistler // micah nemerever, these violent delights // body language; we are fury // 'the penitent' by emil melmoth // chelsea dingman, from 'of those who can't afford to be gentle'
A scar’s width of warmth on a worn man’s neck.
That’s all I wanted to be.
Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.
Discovery: My longest pubic hair is 1.2 inches.
Good or bad?
7:18 a.m. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message.
Couldn’t listen to all of it. That makes three this year.
I promise to stop soon.
Spilled orange juice all over the table this morning. Sudden sunlight I couldn’t wipe away.
All through the night my hands were daylight.
Woke at 1 a.m and, for no reason, ran through Duffy’s cornfield.
Boxers only.
Corn was dry. I sounded like a fire,
for no reason.
Grandma said In the war they would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull . . . Just like that.
It’s finally spring! Daffodils everywhere.
Just like that.
There are over 13,000 unidentified body parts from the World Trade Center being stored in an underground repository in New York City.
Good or bad?
Shouldn’t heaven be superheavy by now?
Maybe the rain is ‘sweet’ because it falls
through so much of the world.
Even sweetness can scratch the throat, so stir sugar well. - Grandma
4:37 a.m. How come depression makes me feel more alive?
Life is funny.
Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac,
there’s a very good chance he’s a douchebag.
Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.
Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?
In Vietnamese, the word for grenade is ‘bom’, from the French ‘pomme’, meaning ‘apple’.
Or was it American for ‘bomb’?
Woke up screaming with no sound. The room was filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead
just in case.
An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.
Yikes.
9:47 a.m. Jerked off four times already. My arm kills.
Eggplant = cà pháo = ‘grenade tomato’. Thus nourishment
defined by extinction.
I met a man tonight. A high school English teacher
from the next town. A small town. Maybe
I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands
of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.
The way they formed brief churches
over the table as he searched for the right words.
I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf from candlelight. His scrotum is a bruised fruit. I kissed it
lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade
before hurling it into the night’s mouth.
Maybe the tongue is also a key.
Yikes.
I could eat you he said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.
I think I love my mom very much.
Some grenades explode with a vision of white flowers.
Baby’s breath blooming in a darkened sky, across
my chest.
Maybe the tongue is also a pin.
I’m gonna lose it when Whitney Houston dies.
I met a man. I promise to stop.
A pillaged village is a fine example of a perfect rhyme. He said that.
He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him.
Either way, I forgot his name by heart.
I wonder what it feels like to move at the speed of thirst - if it’s fast like lying on the kitchen floor with the lights off.
(Kristopher)
6.24 a.m. Greyhound station. One-way ticket to New York City: $36.75
6:57 a.m. I love you, mom.
When the prison guards burned his manuscripts, Nguyên Chí Thięn couldn’t stop laughing - the 238 poems already inside him.
I dreamed I walked barefoot all the way to your house in the snow. Everything was the blue of smudged ink
and you were still alive. There was even a light the shade of sunrise inside your window.
God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden.
My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights.
Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here.
Here. That’s all I wanted to be.
I promise.
- Notebook Fragments, Ocean Vuong
Two Questions by silas denver melvin (@sweatermuppet) for Bleating Thing Magazine issue 1, May 2024 - read online or order in print here
Margartia Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, from Rien ne va plus
[Text ID: “I would have preferred if you had loved me less and understood me more.”]
sometimes i wonder if true love is possible without true understanding
Swimming, One Day in August
by Mary Oliver
It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings.
Something had pestered me so much I thought my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part.
I went down in the afternoon to the sea which held me, until I grew easy.
About tomorrow, who knows anything. Except that it will be time, again, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit.