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

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

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

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

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

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.

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

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

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

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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.

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

"And what does being safe mean? (Besides having to practically get naked to be allowed to get on a plane? Besides dropping bombs?)"...

The morning of Claire's funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints harsh in his hand. It's all I can see. To minimize the pain, he explains with a paternal smile. I smile too.

Though I’m precious not all my thoughts are // of my own hand. So with my father’s hand / writing I acquired imagination in small caps. // My letters bubbled up the page in many large // accidents. I had his teeth to grind them away. / It wasn’t my imagination that licked my stout // heart clean.

Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though deerstalkers know perfectly well they could just wait for the elk to finish bugling its mates before picking up the discarded instruments for a song.