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

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.

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

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

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.

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email.

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

It was night / Death slept naked / on God’s corpse

in a place where one grass blade makes / the next grass blade’s shade / that grass blade made / the next grass blade’s root