Poet, activist, and educator Anthony Thomas Lombardi absolutely slays the page in his debut collection murmurations from YesYes books. It is a collection steeped in survival and song—with the iconic Amy Winehouse at its center, the patron saint of the collection, Lombardi revels in variations of doomed beauty, over and over, until there is nothing left but sacred stain.

What’s the difference between a dead hooker and a Corvette?

One of the men I’ve dated has a wooden cross erected in his front yard, and another guy drives a minivan.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 / 
of the telly series Kung Fu, /  ‘This Valley Has Terror’

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What violence is there in giving someone a name, carving out Ida's real name

of these fourteen strips, lacing up the endless observations each day

in the deformed images of words that tell

Three hits and down I went. Into the floor. Puddled and leaking through the downstairs neighbor’s ceiling.

I feel too sorry, I’m too tired, and though I desperately want to change my life, I’m not in a position to, which is to say I’ve taken up the position of defending my nondefendable position. Position underneath position.

Flung like emotions, tilting to night . . .

Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.

Being an artist is just another phase, / like a kid who eats the glue sticks

“We come here once a month,” the woman added. “To spice things up.”

Maybe next era I’ll get to experience love.

The air felt so heavy that it would suffocate all language.

Stripper show / Hostess bar / Karaoke club

‘Eaten.’ He rectifies, his tongue flips out and recoils in saurian swiftness.

Fully, religiously, rigorously outline, and enjoy the surprises along the way.

Pull your elastic around your wrist / and laugh like a grown woman.

I don’t want anything serious. But come to raves with me. Take drugs with me!

And by:

Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram account (@shortflightlongdrive). Come for the cougar stalking the line between avant-tasteful and not not ironic literary hot mom, stay for zooming in on the books in the background. Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram. I’m liking it for the captions.

But there’s no cup, no / kitchen. Just one mouldy / statue, dreaming of television.

My surroundings, though I’d moved through them prolifically as a child, seemed then like an opaque screen placed there to conceal something from me

Torn textbooks at Widener Library or seeping 
Inkwells those Cajal axons 

out in the Everglades, no resurrection
just a rotting boy's corpse

the day i was born i was yellow and poisoned and anxious.
and they put me under a sunlamp and burned it out of me.

On the train to Avenue du Roi Albert, I knew that this would be the last time I would see her. Feeling time slip over my fingertips like waterflow, I decided I would savor the experience as fully as I

I laugh and say, “is that a Rupi Kaur poem?”