Nora Rose Tomas

On Redaction as Romantic Gesture

Redaction #1 

I am confused, 
I am a simple creature
Don’t worry, she says
I’ll erase that from the record 
I had not been previously aware
of the existence of a record, 
I reply


Redaction #2

She aches for life
and I cut it out
I’m on the floor drinking watery coffee
She bursts into the room screaming
Redacted 


Redaction #3

What would you like to do
all morning, I ask
Redacted, she says
I turn my head


Redaction #4

I wish I knew what I meant 
more clearly, she says
Redacted, I respond 


Redaction #5

Would you like to comment
on my ugliness? I say
No, she responds 


Redaction #6

I wish there was something
after language, she says
I never get to say quite what I mean
Touch, I offer
But if I get that wrong, there is 
no way to strike it through, 
this is why we stick to writing 
letters
I nod my head


Redaction #7

Do you remember being by the high school, 
she asks
Yes, I say, You touched my redacted and I 
felt redacted 
I was as small as I had ever been 


Redaction #8

Would you like to reveal everything, 
she asks
There is a certain temptation inherent 
to the morning, I like to call it nakedness
No, I respond,
She shakes her head, redacted 


Redaction #9

Is it really over, I ask
Redacted, she responds
Even after all this, I still love you
In the places where I can
no longer offer kindness
I can still offer erasure, I say
Is that enough
I wish it were, she looks out 


Redaction #10

I wish I knew what to do I say
I don’t think there is anything left
she says
We have just cut so much away 

Nora Rose Tomas is a queer writer living in New York City. They are an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Their writing has appeared in Lavender Review, Mantis, Small Orange, and What are Birds? among others. They are currently working on a book about sensations. You can follow them on Instagram @dr_sappho.

Kristin Ryan

Scattered Pepper

There was a girl who prayed
for a language that would
burn their hands. 
When it was over,
she mixed together
mud and chalk dust,
the blood from
her loose teeth,
filled up empty
baby food jars. 
The girl would snatch
up dandelions, the milk
sticky on her fingers,
then blow them into the
corners of her room. 
Soon she picked the yard
clean, then the neighbors.
Started pulling more teeth,
used up all the chalk. 
She stole spices,
scattered pepper
in her bed. 
She didn’t know
it was her growing
that made them stop.

Kristin Ryan is a poet and essayist working towards healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. She is a recipient of the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize in Poetry, and her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Her poems and essays have been featured in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Jabberwock Review, Milk and Beans, Moonchild Magazine, Serotonin Lit, and SWWIM among others. She holds an MFA from Ashland University and works in the mental health field.

Haro Lee

In 1985 The Brothels Bloom

In the first two years of
our marriage our government sends a
shipwreck of men

to Saudi Arabia. They’re all others
I could have eloped with: pissed,

digging their
heels at the dirt for rice
that isn’t there.



Can you imagine
the catastrophe. I have one

letter from you: how you
work yourself
into a pigeon-sick fever.



Once, in 2008, our child
from the backseat
hears of your motorcycle accident.

Abba, you must have been lonely

and we both miss it: the phantom
of waerowohsseo. That absent

ache

Haro Lee studied poetry at Colorado College and now teaches English in South Korea, where she lives with her grandmother. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Dryland Lit and Epiphany Magazine. She was the recipient of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize. She can be found on Instagram @haroharibo.

Joshua Effiong

How (Not) To Love

in the place I come from, our hearts have learnt
the fluency of love. our mouths don't speak it,
no, not even by mistake. its volume echoes in
the baritone voice of Papa as he prescribes 500milligrams 
of advice to be taken three times a day. in the strokes 
of cane that burns my flesh 
everytime I go astray. love is nestled in the last crisps
naira notes preserved in the neck of Mama's faded wrappa 
given to me to buy the education she couldn't afford. love is 
spoken in the midnight prayers offered on my behalf. I have 
grown accustomed to this culture and tradition of love, preferring 
actions over mere profession. laying down all for one. and to this 
I will gladly be its custodian.

Joshua Effiong [He] is a Nigerian writer and a lover of literature. His works has appeared in Eboquills, Kalahari Review & Shallow Tales Review. He is an author of a poetry chapbook Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed. When he is not writing, he is reading, watching movies and listening to music. An undergraduate of Science Laboratory Technology. He lives in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. And here he writes from. You can find him on Instagram @josh.effiong and twitter @JoshEffiong

Leah Jones

GENTRIFIED

I drove down Lynch Street, in Old North Durham, where we
once lived. I don’t 
taste the same air. Granny ain’t sittin’ dressed in
nude-pink rollers on the porch. I miss the whap of screened doors. A 
whew it’s hot exhaled into flapping paper fans. Absent 
were the granddaughters scoring
hopscotch along sidewalks 
once traced down to the fingertips. 

The jazz festivals all left. Even 
the moaning lungs of the nomadic saxophone player 
in the faded lavender suit/ once
on the corner of Main Street – has yet to return.
He won’t.

No jingle of ice cream truck in the scorch of summer or 
$1.00 red, white & blue popsicles melting onto hands 
licked clean as girls slap palms reciting east-side- west-side. The park 
with our initials carved by pocketknife
on the trunk of the oaks as big as sky
is a Whole-Foods now.
And gone away are all the proclamations  
of the boys we’d marry.
LS + MJ in a heart was the first spell I cast. 

Catherine’s diner was cleared away. The checkered tile floor
where we danced and studied grownups 
smoking paper-napkin cigarettes in our mimicking fingers
drinking Shirley Temples like vodka and whispering goddamn.

The crepe myrtle in the weeds where I
kissed Monte, is now handicap parking. 
No more corner store for Gina and I 
to strut to in jean shorts, with the guys who 
loiter in a clowder, purring as we pass beneath
the neon sign flashing open.

No men standing in sloping front yards 
echoing sports talk. No uncles with car-lot driveways to
gift us our first ride. Just – new money. 
The fresh white paint over graffiti bleeds through
with the voices of artists now gone. 

I drove down Lynch Street, scaled and gutted
like catfish hooked on a promise that growth would be 
the answer to the struggle yet it was just worm on silver hook
pulling the present from its home and into hands that cut it open
and tossed it into flame. Sprinkling it in that copied flavor they wish
to embody. 

But it does not taste the same.

Leah Jones was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Growing up, she spent summers in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Outer Banks of N.C. She is a full-time military spouse, mother, and gardener. While moving about the east coast with her family, Leah spends majority of her time writing poetry. She won the 2019 Editors Choice award with ACHI Magazine for her novel Diving Horses.

Stella Lei

Aubade as the Night Before You Leave

after Tarfia Faizullah


we watch
                                         meteors shower above the park.
                                         we sit on the swings and cling to
childhood mangling into
                                         rusted chains that flake our palms
                                         with iron: a promise of
decay, among meteors—
                                         metal, rock, ice, leashing sky to earth.
light show as collapse, as
                                         shooting stars streak through your eyes
                                         and you tell me your version of
apocalypse:
                                         supernova, explosive eclipse. moon
                                         bloating the sky and tucking us under tide,
every edge ablaze and
                                         earth knocking itself open—
                                         the city its bruised fist.
undone.
                                         i push off and swing. leaving you-
                                         r explosions simmering below, 
i survey the gold of
                                         each apartment window haloing home.
                                         meteors hurtle on the edges of
our atmosphere—
                                         your irises—and i can almost hear
                                         the buildings howl:
how empty,
                                         how airless this city will be.

Stella Lei's work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Okay Donkey Magazine, trampset, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.

Emma Lee

Finding a Voice I'm Not Sure is Mine

So often, as a child, I’d opened my mouth and someone else 
spoke for me. Or the words weren’t mine but carefully chosen
so I could avoid later punishment or the humiliation
of being contradicted with lies. It was easier to remain silent.

I grew and moved away. I almost had to learn to speak,
to feel my own words in my mouth, hear my own voice.
The poem came out in German, not my mother tongue,
a reflection of how foreign it was to speak naturally.

The daunting ability to say anything I wanted. I remembered
visiting Germany where a different language was no longer a barrier,
I could talk and be understood without being laughed at,
without fear. Being prevented from speaking is a violence.

I had to leave the place I grew up in. To own my story,
I sought refuge in a strange city. I had to unlearn muteness,
discover words horded in an internal dictionary, lose 
the fear of mispronunciation, the habit of self-censorship.

Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib, reviews for magazines and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com. FB: https://www.facebook.com/EmmaLee1. Twitter @Emma_Lee1.

Anthony Aguero

First Night, Palm Springs

Something about the lies surrounding Plymouth.
I was there with the sun pouring wine down my throat,
And I had a bit of mischief in my eyes. Not murderous
Or anything: this was the land of the palm trees and gay bars.
When I say murder, I mean I wanted blood. When I say 
I wanted blood, I mean I wanted life – excruciatingly so.
What I needed was the many kinds of ephemerum.
Let’s not go there. I had just landed in a new land.
The air, abundant. The men, in groves. My body, unsuspecting.
Even the ground I walked on had the capabilities of 
Getting me off. I was on S. Avenida Caballeros,
My hair was a bratty type of short. I was skinny and young.
I believed this was what the earth crouched over for
Just for a peak. I was wrong. It wanted a rib from me.
It wanted to make more and more men. Men are gross.
They want to kill you. And they did. I died on that stupid rock.
It was only my first night. So many more encroaching deaths.
So many more myths to swallow before real danger ensued.
The moon wasn’t even out that night. 
Something going wrong there upon that sunlit rock.

Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared, or will appear, in the Carve Magazine, Rhino Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, 14 Poems, Redivider Journal, Maudlin House, and others. 

Margarita Cruz

Good Again

After ‘Convergence’, 1952 Jackson Pollock


In this painting, we implicate the night; moon appears over windowed cat,
over all of the sheets tangled, limbs struggling to puzzle-piece themselves together.

The corners of your mattress crawl inwards, to the promise
of a Pollock, a splatter of lungs black—red, then white. 

I refuse to paint you anything other than a pair of disembodied fingers,
dis-wristed, unwristed, unsettled.

Formication under chest until the heart beats until it quivers.
Beneath, the promise of a poem refusing to be written.

The limbs squirm as if dancing, as if trying to remember how to be good again.
As if being good again disembodies the weeping or the wounded. As if. 

Arrested by light—yellow, then white. Arriving, arroyo pocked dimples
on pillowcase, slipping out to tear or tear through the night.

In this painting, we implicate. We arroyo wet in desert. Arrested in refusal of 
a body, or any body, of anybody as if splattered or squirming. As if we’re good again.

Margarita Cruz received her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. She is currently a columnist for Flagstaff Live! and an assistant editor at Tolsun Books. Her works have been featured in PANK, DIAGRAM, and the New Delta Review among others. Find more of her at shortendings.com.

Kuo Zhang

Jenny Posted Pictures of Her Son in An Ice Hockey Game

All the young boys
swing their hockey sticks
on the ice,
as they 
chase,
dodge, 
bump
as if they each have 
a sword in hand.

I showed to my husband:
Why don’t we
let Edgar learn it, too?
It’s so cool!!

 Don’t you see how strong they are?

 That’s not for Asians. 

Kuo Zhang is a faculty member at Western Colorado University. She has a bilingual book of poetry in Chinese and English, Broadleaves (Shenyang Press). Her poem “One Child Policy” was awarded second place in the 2012 Society for Humanistic Anthropology [SHA] Poetry Competition held by the American Anthropology Association. She served as poetry & arts editor for the Journal of Language & Literacy Education in 2016-2017 and also one of the judges for 2015 & 2016 SHA Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Gyroscope Review, Coffin Bell Journal, The Roadrunner Review, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Bone Bouquet, K’in, North Dakota Quarterly, Rigorous, Adanna Literary Journal, Raising Mothers, and MUTHA Magazine.

Tyler King

Fragment 2015, in which I try to mimic the cadence of those around me

Now again, the cum of the poem. 
I feel immaculate when the lights are off. I’m gone off the stage soon as the deposit clears.
I feel like Rimbaud when the phantasmagoria hits.
Smile pretty & leave my appetites in the drafts. 
I lit a cigarette with Jess under the bisexual lights & we watched the visions roll by in silence. I 
could sell this longing, could market this as the most divine heresy but I won’t. I’ll take six 
hundred dollars and shut the fuck up forever. Somebody could build a museum of all the 
things we ever called the morning birds outside their names. 

I writhed around on the floor / acid-burned-and-blood-starved /
while they were picking through my notebooks, looking, I assume, for the
shadows of the afternoon sun. 
I wasn’t as lucky as the birds that time, but I could always be luckier, stare out the
window a while. 
Sometimes I forget they gave Union Station that halo of angelfire on purpose.
Everything out there was made to taunt us. 

Navigating this place, its strung out psychogeography. 
I watched your hands scrawl the message & lost the content. Worrying over
tendons, sinew, framerates. The glass fragments, broken under fist; a mosaic of
our cancelled friends, lovers breathless in undulating starlight. Peace lily, cat hair, 
half- melted plastic. 
Sometimes I forget & then
 I have to wake up again anyway.

Tyler King is a non-binary poet from Dayton, Ohio. Their work has appeared in Pandemic Publications, Ghost Heart Literary Journal, The Louisville Review of Books, and other places. 

Daisy Bassen

The form of tragedy

I’m grateful for the chimney,
The open throated flue that directs the smoke
Into the waiting air, where it becomes the scent
Of all autumn memories. I’m grateful
There is a way to keep the fire,
Impersonal as AI, a round multiplying virus,
From burning down my house.

I’m grateful though I needn’t be:
I set the fire, laid the wood cross-wise.
It was my choice, it was all my fault.

Ruin beckons.

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at the University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has appeared in Oberon, McSweeney’s and [PANK] among other journals. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family.

Flourish Joshua

[the life of a man in a cycle of vanity]

a choir of grief sings your extra skins to pieces.
you pick up the pieces & give each a name;
please. me. god. fix. then you bring the pieces
together like puzzle & discover that they are a plea.
"god, please, fix me." 
meanwhile, at twenty, 
the panic of growing 
older slapped differently
like ìjèbú garri in a dry mouth. 
twenty, youthful & lustful,
god's left eye watching,
but twenty said, "life just began".
twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five learned
words like, "balls. libido. clubs. protection".
the panic of growing older beat differently
like little woye & yaremi's taffeta.
[bayo adebowale understands]
forty was confident & brutal,
wearing beards of
responsibilities.
god's hands
beckoning,
but forty said, 
"there's 
[enough] time".
sixty was a stripper.
sixty-five. seventy —
& now, if you saw god, 
you'd rend his pants into
the pieces of your current age —
each piece to patch-up each year,
like inventing a millennial calendar.
you beg death to teach you how to live,
'cause you sold out the days of your youth
like movie tickets. but the earth is an ever-ready 
glutton, patiently laying await in ambush.

Flourish Joshua is a Nigerian Poet, Essayist, Satirist & Editor. He is a Scholar of the Nairobian Writing Academy. His works has been published/forthcoming in East French Press, Praxis Magazine, Glass Poetry, Agbowó, among others. He is the Managing Editor at Naija Readers' Buffet and on the editorial board at Frontier Poetry Journal.

Suzanne S. Rancourt

Gold Thread

with a full moon waxing 
between the constellation estoppel
and acquiescent stink

i pluck a threaded needle in and out ‘the miniscule 
chain links of yak yarn at the seam
where shoulder meets arm

without notice, the unraveling begins
pulls down drizzling weight through sloped yoke 
weariness atop the first snow crunch 

i remember the pissed cursive yellow loops written in snow 
by guys in hope of sex & cheap whisky, their thick urine 
steamed its way to earth before they zipped up

before swerving into connections and tight curves
cars wrapped ‘round trees, windshields explode 
fragments - smells pummeled like hail

rain drips between strobing light bars on cop cars 
toggle clicks in concert 
with squelched commands, data, names

i have this one mizzling day 
to dig for looping roots 
the color of gold piss 

Sundress Best of the Net Nominee, Suzanne S. Rancourt, is of Abenaki/Huron descent. Author of Billboard in the Clouds, Northwestern UP, received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award, and murmurs at the gate, Unsolicited Press, released in 2019. Old Stones, New Roads, Main Street Rag Publishing, is forthcoming Spring 2021. She is a USMC and Army Veteran who holds degrees in psychology, writing and expressive arts therapy. Suzanne is widely published.  Please visit her website for a complete publication list: www.expressive-arts.com

Jessie Raymundo

FOR NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT SINKING

For now let's talk about sinking
Cities, said my mother
Who carries a pair of Neptunes
In her eyes and paints about phantoms
 
In Philippine poetry. Gravity is when
The psychiatrist assessed you
And located a heart that is heavy
For no reason. In an instant, you were
 
In the sea: a merman sticking his head
Above the surface, swathed in salt
Water, standing by for austere arms,
Like a remembrance possessed by echoes
 
Of phantoms playing on a record player.
Almost always, there are greetings--
At sunrise, say hello to clouds, to roosters,
To the maps of music you made in your mind.
 
And when the morning arrived as a Roman
God of waters and seas, you finally walked on land.

Jessie Raymundo teaches composition and literature at PAREF Southridge School. He is currently a graduate student at De La Salle University. His poetry has appeared in a few magazines in the Philippines.

Zakiyyah Dzukogi

[We are our winters]

We are our winters
I’ve watched the sun look a bit grey,
paints on churches
beating gongs in temples.
If the odd slams and the flower
that lied awake on his bracelet
come to live,
we would drop their fumes like bells
and spread it all over the tiles.
If they’ll kick their toes about
and walk-through days night after night,
we’ll align our words that’s God’s
and pull down our scarfs
of melon and date.
we’re not very good a poem,
until we read through the sea again.

Zakiyyah Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet. She is published in Upwrite Nigeria, Wind and Water chapbook, The Nigeria Review, INNSAEI Journal, Konyashamrumi, Literature Voices, Book O’clock, Corona Blues, Heart Links Magazine, etc. She has featured in many Zoom panels discussing poetry including Red Eyes Development Initiative, PIN, 16 days for 16 poets, Open Arts etc. Zakiyyah is the winner of the Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors, poetry 2021.

Julie A. Larick

Ghazal for Sunny Days

I died yesterday, when I heard about the men,
their spiked armor, hot and heavy breath that took men.

The sun spewed asteroid spit, yet
yesterday they were at their front doorstep, only men

downing a strawberry milkshake at the drive-in, mean men
meant well when they loved a kid so hard they shuddered; an old engine.

Were they really mean, or did they tell the truth like other men?
Did death twist their words into pits of glass, bursting at the sun?

I heard about the burnt-up lungs, the sun’s glare as the men
tip-toed their way in its gurgling hot core, their hubris a death sentence,

and I promise you I passed yesterday at the hands of men,
whose strawberry-milkshake sick smiles died in a flash.

Julie A. Larick is a student and writer living in Cleveland. She studies English and Environmental Science at The College of Wooster. Julie edits for The Incandescent Review and interns at GASHER Journal. She has poems forthcoming or published in perhappened mag, Ogma Magazine, and others. Julie loves to sew, watercolor, and was born in 2003. Her portfolio is http://www.julielarickwriting.com and her Twitter is @crookyshanks.

Marcus Slease

Hungry Ghosts

I follow the white monkey (Biała Małpa) down the hole and into the beer garden. Someone is swinging in a hammock. The sand resembles a beach. Minus the ocean or sea. I slip off my shoes. Welcome to Biała Małpa, they say. Before long we are eyeing the beer board. New World IPA, they say. Hoppy as sea foam the hoppy foams before me. I doth partake. Behold we do the handshakes. Very good. Then my secret name. Very good. Someone smiles. Miles & miles of good smile. As god now. Stop, I say. I do not understand, I say. I do not want to become god. Too late, says nobody. I will not knock on doors, I say. You’ve already knocked, says nobody. It is your own door, they say. We foam another hoppy. What is your state, they ask. My state, I say. Yes, they say, your state. I was too much liquid or maybe gas. I needed more solids. I moved to Spain for the solids. Very good, they say. It is a good first step, the solids, that is really something, but then you get used to it, & you want something else. We are all hungry ghosts. That’s where we are now. The hungry ghosts. 

Born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, Marcus Slease is the author of Never Mind the Beasts (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), The Green Monk (Boiler House Press), and Play Yr Kardz Right (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), among others. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts and follow him on Twitter @postpran

Arthur Kayzakian

Darth

i shook darth vader’s hand in england when we were in a department store, and it was cold outside. fall had desiccated small holiday trees lined up on kensignton. if one could see what a summoning looks like in a season before winter, one could see these branches uprooted like crooked prayers. and my mother, who bludgeoned a crazy man with her purse moments ago in the jewelry section—a crazy man who walked around spitting on everyone, who stopped and pulled my hair and i felt my scalp yank toward the clouds, and my mother who left the house in a panic that morning with keys jangling in her hand, complaining about the rain, the stroke of big ben alarming the city of noon, and this mother of mine nudged me toward darth, who was tall, who underneath the death star colored cape and black boots, and humanoid circuitry wired to his chest controlling his heavy breathing, who smelled of plastic and coffee under his mask, was an ordinary man with an earthly need to drink tea, who spoke a disfluent version of english, part saxon, part farsi, part jealous of his partner’s boyfriend, and i stood before darth in awe of the planetary wars he had vindicated in his need to destroy and conquer solar systems, to swallow asteroids and gas filaments floating in swirls of space, and yet went home and took off his boots and waited for his partner to come home from work, which was usually late, which usually meant smelling like cigarettes and wine, so darth would reheat his tv dinner, and watch star trek, and i couldn’t speak but wanted to say please teach me how to skywalk, but instead darth shook my hand and patted me on the head like a good villain should. 

Arthur Kayzakian is a poet, editor and teacher who lives in California. He was born in Tehran, Iran. His family sought political asylum in London when he was three years old to escape the Iranian Revolution.  He earned his MFA from San Diego State University. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International. His chapbook, My Burning City, was a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize and Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. He is a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship, and his poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from several publications including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, COUNTERCLOCK, Chicago Review, Locked Horn Press and Prairie Schooner.

Corie Johnson

Is This The Right Font?

In exchange for $130 the gay boy I have a 
crush on got a giant, blue neon sign that reads TERROR. Fifty
dollars profit. I was way in over 
my head. A loose acquaintance is now on
their way to drop off their freshly extracted 
wisdom teeth. I should start a poem with those lines. This will make
one out of four teeth drop offs complete. My dog’s tail knocked Sara
onto my unvacuumed rug again and 
she was swiftly decapitated for the second time. 7 half used bottles of
super glue, I am not worried. I sent Lucy a mug named Lucy that was oddly
shaped like a woman in a fur coat that gave her the appearance
of hairy arms. A relative of Sara. When she arrived 
damaged we agreed 
that she wouldn’t be moving to Brooklyn if she wasn’t broken
anyway. Every person trying
to date me is trying to ruin it with sex. Did you know finches 
are monogamous? I am carefully
wrapping a miniature
iPod that looks like it is playing a
Taylor Swift song to ship to a friend in Denver. Among it will be
 various green items like the ceramic
woman in the green floor length dress that I said
 was her new mom. I have met 
her boyfriend. She hasn’t. Two summers ago he could hear 
my laugh from the bathroom and thanked me. I am too
busy to be upset.

Corie Johnson is a writer, comedian and maker of very many earrings and ridiculously small books. Not only does Corie reside in Los Angeles, she is also young, cool, and would like you to know that.