Online Exclusive Poetry from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

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

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 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.

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

That empty matchbook winter was a new trudge / through short-light afternoons with time to kill.

Buried on the side of I-20, covered in red maples: the Pro-Life Memorial in St. Joseph, Iowa. A stretch of fenced-in earth, speared with a thousand tiny crosses for all the aborted “children” since 1973—

And the hot thing for spring is orgasm. Everybody’s coming like crazy. The photographers, designers, celebrity guests. People are falling over!