ode to moshing (one room galaxy) - by Annika Crawford

Up on the screen.

Half my house held in my bag.

Dreams up North, family down South.

I hear, I hear, I hear, how my back crackles and drags.

I hear, I hear, I hear, I can could never be one of them.

If they’re the Americans, then who are we?

A foreigner to my people; Who the fuck do I belong to now?

Some place in between. Nowhere; that yellow line that tells you to wait.

!Welcome To

Dallas, Texas¡

by Andres Arevalo

art | Maggie Brosnan

The officer calls me up to the stand.

“You can have your papers back.” (You subhuman human Alien)

by Jake Merritt

i feel like this is the moment where i kiss you and leaf-like shadows of perished hopes

beautiful, in light’s youthful enthusiasm

in gray’s wise embrace

i feel like this is the moment where i kiss you falling heavily, slowly on dreamless fantasies wrought from weak souls

i feel like this is the moment where i kiss you,

The Day I Followed Tia to the Beach The Day I Followed Tia to the Beach

by Juanita Asapokhai

The Tuesday I followed my old best friend Tia to the beach we drove to a discount furniture store that emerged right off the interstate–a big-box warehouse that sprawled like a football stadium between a tiny Jamaican restaurant and a small construction project a couple of hundred feet away, flagged for onlookers by a large and rusting yellow crane suspended in the air. I had seen the crane a quarter mile back; when Tia saw it, she nodded and said, “Port-a-Potty” instructively, tapping her knuckle against her window to redirect our course. I slid us over into the exit lane, while Tia pulled long strands of peeling leather from her seat like a bored teenager.

“Those are definitely not open to the public,” I said as I pulled up beside bands of construction tape. She had already released the clasp of her seatbelt by the time my car rolled to a stop.

“So?” she replied, cracking open the car door and slipping out of the vehicle. “These dudes are probably some kind and generous gentlemen that won’t mind me using their dirty bathroom.”

“Please be nice,” I mumbled. She slammed the door in response.

I watched her as she waved at the group of construction workers surrounding the crane with both of her hands, her footsteps directed towards the shock-blue container standing stationary beside them. I could see Tia switch all of her weight onto one foot and point to the Port-a-Potty. The man closest to her, gripping a hammer by its claw, shook his head slowly. He appeared to be smiling, the skin of his forehead wrinkled and raw, glossed over with sweat, like a red onion torn open, but he remained squarely between Tia and the bathroom. She threw her hand over her shoulder without turning around, and the man’s gaze shifted to my car, squinting directly at my face. He shook his head again, this time pointing the hammer at her for emphasis. Tia straightened her spine so she stood at her full height before turning around abruptly.

“I can’t understand how they expect me to believe that it’s a health hazard to let one more random person shit in a toilet that’s been shit in by a hundred random people this year already,” she complained, slamming the door upon her arrival. She stared out the window at the men again and rolled her eyes, before glancing to her right at the furniture store and the small crowd trickling inside.

“Let’s try over there. There’s definitely a bathroom.”

“Would you want to go shopping for the apartment?” I asked. “Or are we just windowshopping today?”

She paused to look at me with a delighted grin on her face, revealing the badly chipped and jagged front tooth that kept her familiar to me, even as when time threatened to smoothen her into a stranger, and my breath clipped in my chest.

“I knew I brought my wallet with me for a reason. I can already picture my room with a new desk.”

For the longest time, when I dreamed of my future home, I always saw lots and lots of stuff–a once-barren space since sealed up and overflowing with objects, evidence of my self and my belongings tucked everywhere it could, from the front door to the kitchen sink. Ornately designed dining chairs, couches that contorted themselves in unnatural ways as if to impress the human beings that used them; brassy door knobs, lush carpets that licked softly at the soles of feet; walls that were papered and colored at four corners. And yet, my mind was never imaginative enough to picture another person to inhabit the space with me. In the dreams, my head appeared alone.

Tia had a tendency to talk in vague impressions and ideas. A bed with pink, fitted sheets and a wide window, constantly cast open for life–she wove the hum of street noise into her fantasy, chatter from her neighbors, Tia’s own voice pouring through the screen. She had sketched her dream home for an art class during our junior year of high school: a geometric, sparsely decorated apartment that looked like an empty theater stage. It gaped, she said, aching for people, but was held over in a warm glow by the assurance of their imminent arrival. I am so terribly uncertain that I buy a lamp that looks like a person–if people had heads that were shaped like lightbulbs and spines that curved at 60 degrees–and a set of short black and white curtains that could pass for coats hung on a rack if you stared long enough. Tia grabbed a white towel with a “B” sewn into it off a rusted rack. ...continue reading at futurehistoriesmag.org