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

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

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

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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

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.

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

my mother leaning in listening / her usual face her yesterday’s face / out cold on the couch

So much goes on without it baffles every time I begin. I read, I go walking. I take long routes past the elementary school, the fidgety, nebulous line at the crosswalk and the swingsets quaking and singing.

I had not yet labeled myself but felt the pull of men irresistible. I was drawn to a boy and examined every tether but the core one, that I wanted him to feel the same for me and I knew he didn’t. I spent the entirety of that year mourning our potential. I was prepared for Elegy Month.

tell me again about the flood / the water stoppering the air & how our people / learnt to cross it by drowning / afterwards we rebuilt our cities underwater / lest we dared to escape ourselves