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Carlos Andrés Gómez

Last Sundays at Bootleggers

Buy the issue — or subscribe!

My entire wardrobe was Canal
Street original, knockoff chic,
adolescent sleek in my double XL

blue & black bubble jacket.
Yeah, I was inside the club
& what? Inside an oversized

coat coated in sweat & Old
Spice, a kid eyeing sixteen but
not quite there. I wanted it all,

chico: learner’s permit,
the latest Jordans in baby
blue, maybe a wink from

the pretty Boricua from Social
Studies. & when Biggie’s
verse dropped in “Only You”

he was in that room & teaching
us how to live elevated from
that third-floor wasteland towering

above India Point, so we sang,
sour throated & nostalgic
for times we hadn’t yet lived,

in unison: like we wrote it, till our
voices cracked & spilled over
& between every rift but in

the throng of lost kids where
I finally found a self I loved,
it all came together like we

could remix any wreckage
& make it into a stage
to slay, so we swayed &

grinded like our lives
were a music video
tribute, hip-to-hip.

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Volume 40, Number 3
Cover art by Anna Dibble

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CONFLUENCES

Beach Reading

Leath Tonino

Beach Reading

Mind, text, wilderness—I’ve long been fascinated by their interactions. Specifically, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when we lug books into nature, when we situate our reading within a context of more-than-human energies, when we rest the butt on a barnacled rock or driftwood bench and fill the brain to brimming: sentences, crying birds, definitions, slanting light.

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