KEEP PLANNING – Kate Wagner

I am fingering your pomade on the inside of my wrists I am hiding under your bed in your suitcase I am stealing your cigarettes just to taste the bitter ends of them feel them in my mouth right above the wet of my tongue I am rolling around in your leather jacket breathless as the zipper makes its indentation on my bare skin my tiny hands in my hair full of you my palms rutted up against my buck teeth. I am everywhere. I am in the living room on the sectional sofa waiting for you for the smell of beer on your breath for your secret return after the others are sleeping. I am the dinner table beneath mother and father watching you cover your mouth when you swallow. I want your hands spread under my ribcage want my legs wrapped around your guts want to laugh just to feel the spit in my mouth, to excuse the might of my grip on your hair. Sometimes I can sense the words for things that come before the things themselves and you are one of the words for things that follow the shape of my mouth and press against all of my organs like the deep end of the swimming pool. Every morning I want to be thrown over your shoulder like a duffel bag stepping out into wherever we could go how I loved you and how voicelessly how I would have gone anywhere with you how I would have bundled up all of my things and taken off into the night like you did when you came to live with us and when you left again at night on the same train but you were grown and I was small and even though you looked just like me and sounded just like my father how could you have known, where could we have gone?

*** Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. Her fiction has been published in Burial Magazine, Minor Literatures, and Death Kit. This is her poetry debut. 21 October 2026