beauty queen by Hallie Fogarty
Tucson, Arizona
Emma Reed Jones
We talked about it like the promised land. Cinderblock, sand. You had left your longest relationship – resolute, tear-stained, biggest pack on your back. After that, all your belongings were with us in my tiny Oakland apartment. White windows lined one wall, lead paint flaking from the frames. The windows couldn’t close all the way. Sirens entered the room at night like searchlights, and the ravings of madmen from the SRO hotel down the street. “Once a week, your mind turns into water!” one of them kept saying. We laid together on the black and white linoleum in the kitchen. Two women gasping for air like dying fish.
“I’ve always wanted to live in Tucson,” you said.
In Tucson, there would be a dry heat. We wouldn’t be drowning in a lake every time we turned around. On my birthday, G. called to tell me that although we were being monogamous he’d slept with two men at the same time and didn’t use protection. “What did you do with them?” I asked. “Everything,” he whispered. That’s when I shared the news. “Oh, Tucson, Arizona!” he said, turning the words delicately over in his mouth – the mouth I’d drunk moonlight from, now filled with whiskey and cum. He said Tucson was the one place he’d ever found it possible to engage in life. Out here, he couldn’t seem to sustain a thought, a relationship, a note. In Tucson, we’d throw dinner parties. We’d dry out. I looked into jobs and swamp coolers. I yelled at you for smoking in my kitchen and you cried. This was before you decided to go back to Oregon to live with your sister, someone who needed you. This was before I decided to stay in my life.
Emma Reed Jones writes poetry and prose shaped by a lifelong love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. Her writing has appeared or will soon appear in Hobart, Vlad Mag, and The Toast. Emma lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on instagram @emma_reed_writes.
Hallie Fogarty is a poet and artist from Kentucky. She received her MFA in poetry from Miami University, where she was awarded the 2024 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been published in Poetry South, The Lindenwood Review, and elsewhere. Her art has been published in Tulsa Review and Harpur Palate. Her debut chapbook CARAPACE is out now from And Then Publishing. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and you can find her online: www.halliefogarty.com