Three Wrong Turns
by Evergreen Ippolito
This is the pier where you flayed two inches of skin by the pull tag of a hangnail. The humidity put a bag over your head. It dragged you blind and mumbling through Chelsea and the West Village, smiling into restaurants, gasping for work like a woman animal. Watch you don’t drop that phone in the Hudson. Hey cunt that’s expensive. Watch you hold it tightly. Remember that fake island there?
Try holding yourself like a little baby. Try it now. Squeeze yourself, not that hard. Make a map of where the feeling is. You didn’t mean to kill her. Too much? Sorry: try making a map of where the feeling is. Try slowing your breathing. The thought is soft plastic, a bag over your head. Try slowing your breathing. Try slowing your breathing. What kind of bird was that?
Stand now and move in the spandex bodies. The clouds are a bag over your head. It’s not raining yet. In a game, your avatar bumps into bodies, and their avatars say, Excuse you and Watch it buddy. In a game, there’s a day-night cycle to simulate reality. When you meet her she simulates a home to go back to, a Harlem sublet, with roaches big as your bleeding thumb. You give her the cliché about being a time bomb. She cooks you sticky rice.
Try being your own wife now. Try holding your own hand. Not everything’s a fucking game. If NYU punks knew what you did for rent, they’d vomit on their L Train camo. Everything bitter makes sense and no one responsible is in reach. Weren’t you begging a bitch to try? The ones who take from you and live in comfort, or their adolescent sons, dirty and soft and fucking everywhere? Stuck in that spot you can’t reach, taking from you, the Trashdyke Second Coming, avatar of all they love and hate. Starve yourself for something real, not fashion. TikTok wellness check fucking kill yourself.
Try breathing.
The salt-and-pepper man has no way of knowing what color her face was when you lifted the bag, he’s just never seen infected dermals. Not his fault. He can laugh about that, go ahead sir. He’s the one watching. Enjoy the High Line sir.
Lay a bitch out. Nobody does it like you do it. She said she’s afraid of you and it broke your heart, afraid like of white men and goatees, afraid like of thunder. She was broke like you, but she was soft and barely housed. You were a kept woman barely housebroken. When you clocked what you did to her, you pissed your bladder out on her floor.
Remember the code to the docks at Pier 61. Punch it in the metal gate. Find a gangway down. No one’s home. Fucking deckhands used to crack jokes. What’s the joke now, you’re inside.
Remember passing out your first busser-runner shift on the party barge. Waking to Lady Liberty out the porthole, staring at your breasts like a disappointed mother. You felt so afraid. You were trying to get the bag off your head, but the doors led to walls and your shift leader was there. He was standing behind you, confident. He would take from you. The walk-in’s a dead end and the glass bottle is a prayer in your hand. When they carried him to land he said he fell down the stairs: everything you’ve ever done is in self-defense.
Shut the fuck up:
Listen who’s on main deck now. Try to hide. Close the walk-in door behind you. Become an item on the shelf. You hid here when cigar men tried to touch your face. The first few times you didn’t spit on them, you needed cash so bad. When they left a seminal streak on your discount slacks, spinach and artichoke, you came here to panic. You’re doing a good job not panicking. Feel the water all around you. Eat a cold tortilla out of that bag, eat five cold tortillas.
Exclamation marks fade on the man-avatars. They stop their running script. That’s it, no one’s coming to find you. No one sees her in your piss on the floor where you left her. All the home you ever made, sent to another world. You were never unhomeless. This is you almost escaping. The shelf burns your legskin. No one’s coming, try the door.
Try the door. Try the door. Try the door. Try the door try the door try the door try the door try the door.
For a while, it wasn’t dead ends and you were doing well. She lied and said you were safe, she lied and rubbed tiger balm on your defective back. You killed her and nothing changed. You took from her what they took from you and nothing changed except everything soft in your life. You ran away to become what people thought you were. You could have made anything. What, now, can those strong arms do? Try the door?
Try the door.
Try the door.
Try the door.
Try slowing your breathing.
Evergreen Ippolito is a public library worker and writer based in Lenapehoking/New York. Her work has appeared in Transfix Magazine and Imposter Review, and her book The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire was published with Irrelevant Press in 2025. Her website is EvieIppolito.com.
Picture Credit: One Ought Not To Love the Moon (2026) by Natasha Zinos
Natasha Zinos is a painter, filmmaker, and independent curator currently based in Venice, Italy. They are the founder and director of the online project tongue .etc. Their work is motivated by a drive for erotic and mystical liberation. You can find more at https://www.panopticonostasis.com/ and on Instagram @panopticonostasis
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