The landlord stared hard into the glass bong like it held

The answer to some innumerable loss— I hated him; I wanted

To shoot him in the gut. His wife stood before me with a billion eyes

Like an angel crash-landed into a white star life. Monica asked, Perhaps

Your Profit Will Be Your Own Deposit? I appreciated the defense, but I was

Certain nothing broken gets fixed if the land has capitulated

To avatars of tenants. We were dreaming of true love

In a world of virtual tweakers. The nazis loved uppers, my landlord

Eats adderall from a repurposed gum dispenser

Kept amidst the animus of his right breast pocket.

I’m not drawing a gun and/or conclusions. I am

Reporting the blues. I am sitting in the living room wearing a thermal

And winter boots. The couple, who owns the place I slack

My bones, asks if I’m really that cold. They say, they have

Been in climates more frigid. Like poor life is a Nordic vacation.

So now my dick is eldfjall and I piss a fjord into their clogged vaskur;

I like to feed their pipes my dark animal grease, to be clear, I like to

Obscure. She asks me if I like the old oil smell of my masonry

Heater that engulfs, booms small hyacinths of pale fire, that threatens

With a grotesque pilot to consume our whole planet.

I have very little to say on that thing that does definitions—

My landlord, her husband, their old deadly oven, my addiction,

My security, my panopticon subscription. I have brought them all here

To perform their own lives’ necessary repairs. They have brought me all here

because all they’ve ever left is nowhere.

Andres Cordoba (he/him) is a Massachusetts-born writer. In 2019, he received the Thayer Fellowship, Patricia Kerr Ross Award, and was named a Breakout 8 Writer by Epiphany Literary Journal. He was a finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2020 Poetry Contest and Quarterly West’s 2025 Prose Contest. He has received support from Brooklyn Poets and was a Periplus Mentorship Fellow. His work can be found in The Harvard Review, As It Ought To Be, and Epiphany. He earned his BA from SUNY Purchase and his MFA in poetry from Brown University where he won the 2024 John Hawkes Prize, 2024 Edwin Honig Memorial Award, and 2025 Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop Prize. In

2025, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. He lives in New York where he is the co-poetry editor for Big Score Lit.