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

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

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,

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

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.

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

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

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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.

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.

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.

Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

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

Two hands pluck me from a river, / and unfold my pages to the sun.

Here is something we have learned time and again: you need not love everything. You do not have to devote yourself to what you thought you’d enjoy. You can decide, whenever you like, that what you feel is no kind of love.

The man has a gun. He walks into a bank with the gun. He sees himself from the outside, enacting a scene from a movie. He shows the gun to the security guard, who sits down, and he shows the gun to the cashier, whose face congeals with fear, and it’s all happening too fast, too automatically.