Waxing Phase

Sparrow day
draining to red

red wall of night
night a voice

caught within the throat
the throat a tunnel

a blackened river
a wing bending

a moonrise

Night

He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.

I worried I had magically bloated between 9 a.m. and lunch time, even though I’d only eaten the prescribed six saltine crackers.

that was the year that all the carnivals came to town. sounds like a fake small town thing, but when you live in a small town, all the things that happen are fake small town things, except they’re

The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.

And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.

I was a glamour upon a glamour upon a glamour, a mouth devouring a mouth devouring a mouth.

hemos vuelto heridos de una guerra que todavía no empieza
yo perdí una de mis extremidades
y él las perdió todas

HOW DO I GET MORE WEIRD RUSSIAN ART GALS TO FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM I ASK BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE MOST INTERESTING PROFILES AND SEEM LIKE THEY COULD SUCK YOUR DICK SO GOOD THEY COULD ROB YOU OF

The aliens were everywhere that summer.

You can never return to the track. A hard truth, heaven knows, but heed me— delay the wreck
and coma. Take a longer backwards way and savor that last downhill run, the final door to close.

I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.

Hobart and HAD contributor Rebecca van Laer's debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, April 12) weaves together poetry, fiction, and criticism to follow the narrator Charlotte as she

The parrot's flamboyant red and blue plume cocks, shivers. The family approaches.

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”

As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.

On Penguins in Brooklyn

the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she

September Dream

An eternity, for the Asphodel, is a brief few
months. It’s been a decade, as the crow flies,

ten days on Venus, ten Venus days,
each, longer than a year.

When I’m without

I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.