is there a ghost did you incur any loss did you improve (melancholy horn solo) did you forgive did you take did someone else receive Emily Pinkerton lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing has previously appeared in ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, Foglifter, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) …

They’ve taken the temperature of our city and rubbed its feverish veins. Sweat starts to rise from the open sidewalks. Blinds drawn, screens opened, faces lit from below. Our thoughts begin to throb. Soon the waxing and waning of clothes. You have learned how to process noise, how to read it, the feeling one should take from certain words, like machine-gun or Glendale. The kind of noise that endures— the flashlights that refuse to fall from the sky, the millions of radio waves washing …

Around here, a pause is always violet-coloured, mostly strung on necklaces and crumbling to sugar between teeth. The flowerbeds new I think, speaking to headlamps in their starred tartness. There’s a way light diffuses across this mess of one-way signs, the thick network of icing on the tarmac, that crumples my 18th birthday to some archive corner. I knew the scorched orbs of streetlights, I knew the waiting space of the estuary, and little else, and that’s okay. I have come to …

Dear poet of nooses of sharp okra & tired trams my bones are filled with wet tobacco & spent coffee grounds with the sound of ten thousand hammers hitting brass in unison your name hollows space in the soft-cavity of my mouth & I have no shape to make of your sound forgive me I have wagered everything on blowing spring cherries back into cigarettes that continually ghost us on soup-thick something I have once again forgotten to name out of a deep care for …

after Terrance Hayes Last spring, I hid you in a poem of greenery, described the distance as furious and never thought I would feel that way too. I wrote of sesame seeds spilling from our bagels onto the sheets, scraping my legs all night and all through the summer until you were back. Now I lock your love notes in a quart-sized Ziploc, let my memories slide off like egg yolk. I’ve made you both villain and victim here. The villain is reckless, kissing everyone at the party while I doze …

Time turns into the way. I’ve to sit, for blood pressure to stabilize. Having learned doing nothing, I navigate the nurse’s understanding, later the doctor’s need for answers, saying I drank three cups of coffee before the taxi delivered my trust here. Figures still before me, soundless after the year of uncertainty. Seated, I travel, with my eyes, across vulnerable rows, ideas of hope chaired. We hold our consent’s forms, signatures affixed to the universal promise. We share the better day …