By Thalia Geiger
Featured Art: “Jordan (she/her)” by Jemma Lee Roe

I am wearing my leopard pants when I enter
the train. I tell a girl how much the book hurts
that she holds beside her. There is Pink
Whitney in a flask in my purse and punk
rock trickling through the buds in my ears.
I sit and read, too, a poetry book about gay
intimacy. Nothing I know. The world stretches
sideways as we roll through the clearing
in the trees past Washington Lane, past
Germantown. I am stuck in my ways of loving
things from afar. It is all I know how to do.

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Thalia Geiger is a poet and fiction writer, author of the chapbook Wild Like a Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025), and her debut poetry collection, Red Death, Purple Dark, is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing. She is the winner of Black Fox Literary’s 2025 Summer Fox Tales Contest, and her work has been featured in New York Quarterly, Allegory Ridge, Coffin Bell, Grim & Gilded, and more.