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Tomas I am a Freudian dream while you are not lucid yet We are illuminating Hobbs kissing by the clock We are Brooklyn-bound L train pulling into Bedford We are yoyo-ing friction between rubbing thighs We are four texts and a stop away from your bedroom yet You are the closing of subway doors while I am still six steps away
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Luis *contains strong sexual material*
We are drinking; you are slurring I am blushing while you lean over and whisper: “I would fuck you so hard.” And me, half flattered half offended I just say, “Thanks.” “But I can’t and I won’t because,” you gesture to the empty space in front of us, “you know.” I don’t but I nod anyway. a Then we are kissing with mouths half open on a stoop in Chelsea, our darkened faces blending into the wrought iron fence so no one will notice our lip smacks and quiet sighs. There are no meanderers at this hour I don’t think because right now there is nothing but your hands in my hair and our knees pressed together. “This doesn’t mean anything,” you gasp between these gulping kisses and I nod as best as I could with your hands gripping my face. This doesn’t mean anything because we aren’t anything, we aren’t even on the same plane we aren’t even real we are just stoop kids kissing with tequila on our tongues. It’s not as romantic as it sounds because you suck on my upper lip and I don’t like it, it feels foreign like a rubber clamp pinching sea anemones. “Come on.” c3 c
I hesitate. “Yeah, come on let’s go.” You flash me a quick as lightening smile like that is all the permission you need from me. Unsure, I am led by your gripping hand and into your apartment so that now we are on your couch and you pull me on top of you even though I am confused and a small voice tucked behind my ear is tugging at my motor neurons asking me if this is what I want. I don’t know, I say to this tug but before I make up my mind your fingers are in me while your hand is on the buttons of my dress. I reach down and grip your wrist, still deciding whether or not I want this and I pull. It’s like air to your wrist like it hasn’t even occurred to you to ask or leave me some room to hesitate or decide if I want you there and I don’t really blame you because physically I am dripping but I do blame you a lot because you are invading invasive I am invaded. It ends with your cum stinging the roof of my mouth and I finally wrench away from you, lamely saying I need air when you go to cage me in your arms with a lazy, satisfied smile. I am confused and ashamed like I just did something bad but sex isn’t supposed to feel bad so why am I left with a metallic taste in my mouth and a heaviness in my stomach like heavy rusty chains are rubbing against once pink organs? You come out and hug me and say, “I like to cuddle after, you know,” and I don’t fucking know and now your touch feels like a thousand maggots too eager to wait until the body starts festering so I step back and mumble that I have to go. You, because you do no wrong, kiss my cheek and tell me to call you. c4 c
But I won’t and I don’t and you are still wondering when will the next time we meet be, like “no” isn’t part of your lexicon, like you can trample acres of virgin woodlands and shoot deer in the name of masculinity, because that’s what men do, that’s what Hemingway did but even Jake backed off Brett in the end. So there is no excuse for your declarative sentences and heavy period punctuations but you don’t even attempt to make one since this is what you think men do, this is what you do. Now I am sitting on the street a few blocks away feeling as if my blood has turned into black sludge, black sludge of your cum sticking to my lungs my thighs my soul while you are sitting on your bed reading Kerouac expecting my call.
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Noah We are standing next to each other I can feel your arm, feel the hairs brushing against each other and if only you’d realize our nerves are colliding, if only you’d look over and see me wanting but instead cementing to the chain linked fence. It hasn’t occurred to you yet that if you looked over our glances would cross paths, you going west me going east, and if you looked over we could fall in love right now and only for right now. You haven’t realized it yet so I’m here by the chain linked fence waiting for it to dawn on you like the headlights of a passing car or when the door of the subway car stops perfectly in front of you and sliding open there I am. As the night trudges on you haven’t looked at me yet and I am slowly creeping out of my skin until I am high above you above me above them, until I am watching the space between us widen even though I am cemented to the chain link wall and you are glued to the backyard band. With each tick of time there is a deep bubbling welling up in my chest, like hearty stew boiling but it doesn’t taste good it tastes like bile and Xanax. I am gagging on the spliff in between my lips but no one will notice the wretchings of my lungs soaking into the roots of this tree. I can feel the lard melting off my bones, this gross thick slimy mass sliding but I am not pounds lighter, and even though I am escaping away, I desperately want you to look over and hold me steady with your dilated gaze hold me together as lard is dripping down my thighs. This panic lasts for a minute, slugging away with the metronome of my shallow breaths but you are fine you are so very fine standing there with your impervious gaze stubbornly c8 c
blinking away. I am disassociating, unassociated, but more so than anything I just want to be associating, associated with you here among discarded beer cans and emptied cigarette cartons. If only you’d look over if only anyone would look over, see me chained to this chain linked fence escaping, evaporating, vaporizing.
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Jacob
And maybe it’s because I usually am. Sitting on your bed, legs crossed staring at your doodles taped against taupe dorm walls. Sufjan Stevens is playing from your computer, and periodically you’da look up from the trance of thought that captivates you more than I ever could to receive the almost-extinguishing joint. Your boyish scrawl dares to pick fights with the Times-New-Roman fonted, heavily edited heavily pedantic rhetoric of dead white men within the pages of your books, lying scattered across the table by my feet. This isn’t the first time I’ve been here, on your bed across from you quiet with a silence comfortable enough to slip into sleep. It isn’t the first time that I’ve shared a joint with you while reading you my poetry, only to look up and find you staring at me like I was Babylonian woman carved from the earth. It’s also not the first time you brushed your hand against my shoulder and sent neurological zappings across synapses to c 12 c
flood bloodstreams with carbonated happy-fizz, like I was a can of orange soda and you shook me up and left me on the patio table, dying to explode, unable to explode. “I figured out how I’d describe you,” I announce. “What?” You say, looking up at me, dilated pupils forming eclipses over blue moons. “Remember when I asked you how you’d describe me, and you told me you don’t think people can be described in categorical qualities? That we are more vivid than being reduced to all-encompassing adjectives like ‘nice’ and ‘funny’ and ‘anal’?” I respond, taking out the black notebook I use to scribble notes about David Lynch, my walks, sometimes you. “Oh, yes. Yes I said that you are like a leaf, or something buoyant, didn’t I? Buoyant to float on the surface of the water, but able to submerge down into the depths of the ocean blue and still come up for air and continue floating.” You laugh, nodding vigorously. “Yes, I remember.” “Yeah, well I’ve been thinking and I came up with something for you. So I take back what I said about you the other night,” I pause for a second, blinking twice. Something is caught in my eye but I am too high. “You are the most fun labyrinth in the world, this Alice-in-Wonderland like structure and everyone else, including me, is running through this maze of your mind trying to reach the center, to the core of you. Your thoughts are these twisting, turning, illusionary pathways with trick doors and tunnels that lead to completely different pathways and it is the most fun maze in the entire world, because even your dead ends contain a gift so wonderful and absurd and vivid. Does that make sense?” You are quiet for a moment, looking me in the eyes. I don’t know if it’s because we’re both high, but I am stunned for the c 13 c
moment. I am reduced to a too-fast beating heart: sizzling electricity, electrifying, electrocuting. Then, the slow ascent at the corner of your lips, then the other, and now you are grinning from ear to ear, Cheshire cat with purring on the ash stained carpet. “That made me feel good. I like that a lot,” you admit, chuckling, low hiccuping laughs vibrating. I like you a lot, I think, and then immediately am mortified. I hope you don’t hear it, even though I know you didn’t. But sometimes it’s hard to tell because you seem to have a telephone line, one of those can strings reaching across our two windows, pressed up against my mind. Or pressed up against the underside of my hand like you are now, where nurses take the pulse, you reaching past me to open up one of those rectangular Dutch windows. “God it is hot as balls,” you mutter under your breath and go to take off the blue sweater you were wearing the night we met under the alcove of cobblestone buildings converted into basement shows, the one where cigarette smoke from my Marlboro Gold still clings onto those wool fibers so that when you pull it off, as you are doing now, it hits you again, briefly, of the night you spent with me high and happy-fizzing. I know that it does, because it hits me, sitting next to you, and because you pause to glance at me, a cursory glance with a slight stolen peek at my mouth, a glance that freezes linear time and temporarily we are sucked back into that cobblestone night where it was just me and you huddled in a corner, just as tonight it is me and you almost huddled in an almost corner of your bed. We are stuck and paralyzed, and I can feel you and every molecule of whatever it is that is thick and heavy between us, c 14 c
like molasses sugar with the viscosity of coconut oil lubricant that you’re not supposed to use with latex condoms (but you kind of do which then you feel guilty for after). I know you can feel me too because your lips part just a hair’s width and you try to suck some of this molasses air up through your teeth. I can almost hear it turning into brittle on your tongue without the humidity of my sweating palms keeping it colloidal, hear it rattling down your throat but it is futile because the second it’s gone it’s back again, filling, filling, expanding, expanding, until we are saturated. BzzzZZzzzzZzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzz It’s your fucking phone. Your fucking phone metal piece against wood rattling in the brightest ugly noise like the bells back in high school signifying the end of day dream hypnotics during history class. Just as we were stuck you became unstuck and while I am still stuck your unstuckness is lightening fast and you snatch your phone, slightly out of breath, huff out a “Hello?” “Yes, I’m just here with Emmy.” “Yeah okay great. I’m here until whenever.” “Okay, just call me and I’ll let you up.” You hang up and shuffle over to your desk, taking out papers and more weed. “Eleanor’s coming over, is that okay?” I smile faintly at the mention of your girlfriend. “Yeah, that’s cool.”
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Contributors Aleck Venegas Noah Morrison Spencer Kaplan Daniela Rios
Contact
Emmy Badavocados@gmail.com
Daniela (Design) Helveticafont@aol.com