Andrew Narain

ANDREW NARAIN

i can’t breathe

wake up. make your bed. don’t forget your lunch. remember to drink water. i love you. take a sweater. take the train. notice that man staring at you. don’t say anything. don’t look. be aware of your surroundings. your body is not your own. don’t wear a hoodie. everyone is watching you. facebook live saves your video. don’t walk alone at night. comply. know your rights. comply. can’t sell loose cigs. can’t hold up finger guns. can’t hold a cell phone. can’t roll over. can’t talk back. can’t say no. i love you. be safe. don’t buy skittles. don’t let them see you cry. never reach for anything.

know your rights. comply.

can’t go to the grocery store. can’t play in the park. can’t drink. can’t drive. can’t run. can’t walk. i can’t breathe. what are you following me for. i can’t breathe. i can’t breathe. they are going to kill me. i didn’t even do nothin’. officers, why do you have your guns out. you shot me. you shot me. why did you shoot me. stop shooting. everything hurts. i can’t breathe. please don’t let me die. i can’t breathe.

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Henry Stern

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Alphabet Soup

songs have spilt their way out of my throat and I have been vomiting alphabet soup since I was three and tried to spell “special” amidst chaos, I am twelve and listening to friends in the locker room, “I hope you’re not a lesbian, they should change with the boys, not be creeps,” and ever since then I occupy the single-stall in the bathroom, I am thirteen and my life is going nowhere, I say a silent prayer to a god I do not know exists, to unbreak me, maybe it’s to unravel me, and maybe that was a prayer to Christ or Trimurti, my grandmother used to keep a painting of him on her bedroom wall, god of destruction and yesterday a man started to follow me home, took the same two trains, an hour ride home with me, and I hid in the bathroom at Dunkin Donuts for twenty minutes because I couldn’t breathe and I know how to say “war” in four languages but sometimes I wake up and don’t remember my name, I had a dream once where I was a vampire, or maybe I was just a regular ol’ joe shmoe pretending to be a vampire, there was a bag of rice on the table and I just started counting it, 1, 2, 3, to 8,365 when I woke up, I tried to fall back into my dream

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Red Lines On Skin, Living In Sin

perhaps if this body was not my body, i would find it beautiful. sitting across from me on the train. reading my favorite book. i would wish all day

that i had struck up a conversation. at a party. dancing. i’d wish i had waved hi. perhaps even just in the domestic, quiet moment of morning,

freshly woken, messy hair, mucus stuck to the corners of its eyes. lying down makes its stomach look the smallest. sitting makes it bunch up

in rolls. perhaps then i would want to touch its face. stop it from destroying itself. it doesn’t use the scissors anymore, but it skips breakfast sometimes.

lunch, too. it mutates. it adapts. it looks at the red marks on its right thigh, ancient carvings, the way they jiggle when it

moves, and it thinks, cleverly, i will destroy myself in a way no one can see. inside out. no one sees inside out.

politics section. read the news. global warming

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Nina Sloan

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The Figure Five

i saw the figure five on the fire truck and it was

beautiful. call me delusional. people don’t change.

they suck in high school. suck in college. suck when they’re adults in loveless marriages with shitty jobs and then they’ll suck every last goddamn out of you. it’s a funny

cycle, really. it’s just you and me sitting

on a bench and it’s snowing. it’s snowing and a single clump just fell down the back of my coat and

i touch you and you jump.

you still feel weird running your tongue over the fronts of your teeth where a metal cage used to sit. the

last color you got was red like santa’s hat or an old crayola marker bleeding or blood on the milky way on your back but it’s snowing and your hands

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are shaking and ice cold because you hate wearing gloves and it melts when it hits the sidewalk. when it touches the grass, a soft embrace, it lingers for a painful moment before breaking into water droplets that make the grass

droop. there’s this space between you and me

where our hands used to touch and all i feel is cold, the cold and the white and i don’t have a damn thing

to be sad about so why am i crying. vision blurs and your face is a brown blob and it all narrows down to the slope of your hair along the side of your neck and

the snow falling in between us.

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