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.

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.

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

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Brian Van Reet, winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, talks with Gulf Coastintern Melissa Dziedzic about his story, “The Window.” Melissa Dziedzic:…

The only Korean word I know is oma,/meaning mother. I sit across from her in the low light of the Korean restaurant/downtown. We hold rice paper menus/up to the candle's glow...

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

Memoirist, editor extraordinaire, and dedicated literary citizen, it’s hard to miss Lilly Dancyger either out in the world or across the internet’s literary platforms