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

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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.

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

And when there were no more to kill, I kicked the flowers, sent bursts of petals coursing through the air. My legs got tired—I wrapped fingers around stems, started ripping them up, choked them into a bouquet too big for my hands...

It turns out some people will risk anything for a haircut. They will meet under a bridge, they will text unknown numbers, they will venture out into a pandemic. It turns out that I may have a strange relationship, obsession—whatever you want to call it—with hair, but so does almost everyone else.

How long will I last before ruining this? / Escaping the heat that teethes from your chest / like barbed wire with little dogs in it. / Mess of your face cracked from sweat.

Today, however, all I could think of was the nose of Gogol. The image of a human-sized nose banging on my door.