green girl house

it escapes me

the look of things lately

and why your floors heal my feet

lurking old farm town 

decaying corn fields

cold vacant grown-up stares 

a girl with too much to feel

There’s no time to die in that 

Salty citrus city black hot asphalt sizzles the sausage patty on your breakfast sandwich Friendly Felon Line Cook flips it and it lands heads up FOR GOOD LUCK in the blue fountain at the mall you work at

The computer banks in the dark and air-conditioned basement of GeoLab lay quiet, and the swivel chairs facing them were unoccupied. The Seacoast New Hampshire Company recently won awards for its fast-track completion of a COVID-19 vaccine. A casual observer might wonder why such a successful company would look like a ghost town, on a weekday during business hours.

Austin Kemp rose from his sweat-dampened bed and walked over to the mirror above the sink in his one room apartment. He leaned in and tried to pull the tortured dreams of the previous night into focus. It was always like this for him; he would recall something significant but indistinct. He knew that his dreams resolved issues in his life, and he felt distress when he could not pull them to the front of his mind to view.

The photo is a grainy Polaroid of a woman smoking a cigarette with black smudged eyeliner, fishnets, dirty combat boots, and a plaid skirt. Her middle finger is raised towards the camera and she has a look that screams I don’t give a fuck. It has been reblogged thousands of times by Tumblr users like myself. Tumblr was an essential social media platform for me back in 2014 when the app was at its peak. Being given access to the internet at such a young age, Tumblr posts such as these made a huge impact on the way I dressed. I started listening to Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, and The Neighborhood, artists associated with the “alternative” Tumblr aesthetic.

It was late June as we crossed the Montana border and started our descent over Idaho. Bellow, sage, and scrub brush shape the valleys into jade inkblots running between sand-stained peaks slashed with occasional seams pale of shadowed snow. The ridges eventually gave way to a patchwork of green farmland as we banked sharply towards the city and finally touched down among the shimmering heat waves of the Boise tarmac.

After a trip to the second-hand store, I’m only 30 dollars down for a pair of Levi jeans and several vintage tees. To find a similar pair of jeans on Depop, however, prices typically start at 40 dollars for a single pair alone. These high prices make second-hand fashion inaccessible and reverse its original purpose of charity. Why is Depop, an online thrifting app, becoming so expensive, and how has the rise of thrifting affected the fashion industry?

As the seasons change, she remains, unable to let go. She spends all her time at the tracks — now that she has all the time she could ever want. Laura often watches the trains rush by on their daily trips to the station. When she was alive, she loved to walk and loves it still. The smell of the sea, the beauty of the leaves in autumn, and spring’s blooming flowers. Nature’s beauty provides comfort. The birds singing from their perches in the trees above the tracks keep her company. Now the birds are her only friends.  

He was an assassin. . . roaming. . . the night sky hid his presence. He was in control of the filthy streets. Graffiti filled the walls, rats scurried around the leaky garbage cans, and the pavement cracked at every step. The assassin stayed unfazed, gripping his knife by the blade. A sliver of blood ran down his hand, onto his forearm, and dripped drop by drop onto the wretched ground. He was still unfazed.  

It’s a Friday night — the weekend before Halloween, and although the late autumn breeze has turned into frigid gusts, hordes of your peers are already standing in line to get into the bars on Main Street in inapt uniforms consisting of spaghetti strap tank-tops, ripped jeans, and freshly flat-ironed hair.   

Lil Tjay superfan Abby Chorches, 20, waited outside in the cool November air among a crowd of UNH students hours before the concert began. “I was here at 4 p.m. I wanted to be front row,” she said. “It feels rewarding; I’m hype—I’m excited.”