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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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

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

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.

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

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.

They sit on mats assigned to names and say their names in bursts of glee or whispers. The Portuguese Man-of-War has no name...

Time can mean grace for survivors of sharp ends. Like, how one afternoon, god meant finding your eyes. I’m trying to say thank you for teaching me how to quit arching away from the glass, how to lean in.

Days I can’t feel you, I dive my body / into the deep end, pluck golden leaves / from the silty bottom, nearly drown

The buildings were rundown and whatever light came from them was like the leftover glow of an all-night party. Tonight, those same lights were electrified, lit up along the grid.