by Kathryn Kulpa...Once we shared the backseat. Trusted someone would always be there to drive. The auxiliary parents: your dad, my mom. They were unemployed, sometimes, or their jobs didn’t matter. They had time for our foolishness.

by Kathryn Kulpa Ian Taylor I don’t know if what we did could be called love. A furtive scrabble in the dark underpasses between our other lives. In someone’s empty office, in convention center greenrooms. I was always asking you for something. Breath mints. Safety pins to pull myself together. Things you never carried. Our affair was like a tangerine, juicy but just too seedy. We’d try to give each other up, then fly together after two weeks, thirsty, lost, your hands holdin

by Kathryn Kulpa Hu Chen 1. The girl in first grade with the big glasses that took up half her face and one lens was smogged over because she had lazy eye and you asked to borrow her milk money to get chocolate milk and she said she only had enough for one but she’d give you her milk if you’d be her friend and you said you would and you sat with her that day in the cafeteria, but never again. 2. The man in the orange prole cap in the white pickup who followed you for miles on

by Kathryn Kulpa Javi o We’re at it again, pretending nothing’s changed. Shiny happy people out for a walk. Holding hands, even, but we give that up after two blocks. The effort. The sweat. We never walk downtown where the tourists go but tonight here we are. The heat drove us out, the strain of being contained by the same walls. We won’t have the talk tonight, but it’s there, waiting. Air conditioning blasts our legs outside a basement pub, the rank smell of beer. There’s a