The Arrest, in all its surreal narrative trappings, supercars, and Hollywood theatrics, wants to know if words can save us in a dystopia.
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after “In Which I am Already the Queer Igbo Elder I Needed” by Nnenna Loveth Nwafor I can tell you stories just like anybody else about this place. I ate the soft
Medellín There is no metaphor for the remainsof a bombed car in a basketnor for the Shepard lying beside thema roach writhing between his pawsnor for Rocío kicking hima cigarette between her
He comes into the Pluckers—hot.He hugs me, lifts me off the ground.Swaps out his Aviators & tac glovesfor a paper bib. This freshly minted Alamo Ranger?He’s buying.Right now, he’s on dogwatch—the shit
NEW ORLEANS IS FORSAKEN THIS TIME OF YEAR a cartoon cigar smoking a cartoon cigarette with a look of rancid terror on its filter-face. you good? i’m good. nails bitten down low
my dad and i spit the same blood. thunderstorms roll to the sound of our bodiescontracting television fevers. my family goes to church the same way, hair greasy, spines stooped, iphones frying
with lines from Sappho, Bishop, and Oliver Sometimes I forget my non-man hands—like can openers—cut circles in the air. If the silence in each fingertip is hereditary. If submersible. If for once /
The chalk creaks in agony on the blackboard.We hate this double English. Still not evenmidway into the first period that happensonly on Tuesdays. The minutes grind onlike stilt walkers on my new
Apocalyptic Date Idea #1 What if we kissed for the first time and I tried to stop it—sprinting up the street, scraggly-bearded, soot-skinned, tearsacross my face, minutes until the portal to my
Daily promise of blankness Scraping against whiteness Not loneliness but loneliness The house is not the room is not the bed is not the moment is not Cold nestling in after My
Allie Hoback is a poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in New