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POETRY

Center, a dancing couple. To the left, a couple kissing, the man's back toward the viewer. Above, a young man leaping. To the right of the dancing couple, a nun, her back to the viewer, pointing towards the center. All these figures are cut out of black and white pictures, and placed against the background of a faded-color tropical location with a hidden house, a river and a volcano.

Roost Profusion
by Karen George

O, to live in a greenhouse palace, a conservatory, stone walls broken with glass—massive multi-paned windows, ceiling dome open to dewy zephyrs—surrounded by conifers, mosses, ferns, angiosperms.

On the right, a spiraled green horizontal line on a dark background.

Speaks the Dark Lobe
by L. I. Henley

Speaks the Dark Lobe    The dog is no use now that he’s dead.    And here I am without porch light, without moonlight.                                                                […]

FICTION

Side view of a woman's hands typing on a computer keyboard.

Transcriptions
by Kathleen Jones

Mary isn’t a great internet name. When she introduces herself to someone new, she always assumes they’re picturing the lady who birthed the baby Jesus or a different Mary washing Jesus’ feet or a pious and forgettable woman circa 1610 or 1743 or 1872. She wears muslin skirts and a mop cap and goes about […]

"Cliffs on the Sea Coast: Small Beach, Sunrise (Falaise au bord de la mer, vu Petite Plage, soleil levant)" (1865) by Gustave Courbet from the Art Institute of Chicago

Saoirse
by Peter Gordon

Can you imagine naming a girl freedom? he asks me. Can you even know what that would do to her brain, starting when she was a baby, being someone who gets to go through life doing whatever the fuck she wants?

NONFICTION

Woman with orange long sleeve top. Both arms up making rock and roll signs with her hands. Still from the movie STICK IT.

MAYDAY Staff Poll: Best “Break Up With the Job” Films

The MAYDAY staff propose their favorite break-up-with-the-job films and TV shows. Celebrate spring by quitting! Or, rather, vicariously quitting through “Office Space.”

Headshot of the author wearing a dark sweater with a blurred background of a tree.

Stigmata
by Gabriella Graceffo

Halfway up a mountain, I’m desperate to see a ghost. Not the way I used to be, letting faucets drip at night, leaving light switches half-flipped; a dozen small gestures begging supernatural interference. Now I look for ghosts to understand why my body feels more haunted than any place.

TRANSLATION

Book cover of The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose (2008-2021). Blue and white background. A nude woman sits on a tree branch in the center. Across the bottom is a colorful abstract rectangle. A deer lies to the right of the woman's feet. A bat flies in the top left corner, and a squirrel is on the tree branch. There are lines coming out of the woman's eyes that connect around the image like a web.

The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli translated from the Italian by John Taylor,
reviewed by Caroline Maldonado

Italian poet Franca Mancinelli has internalized the landscape she grew up in poetically to express some of her deepest emotions. Beginning from the tremors, earthquakes and mudslides of her life and landscape, the poet develops her riveting ars poetica. “I have often felt that I carry writing in my body,” she writes, “that I have been inscribed in the darkness. (…) We are the imprint of the time that has been, of the life that has passed through us. By writing we bring to light these signs that we contain, as they are, obscure and indecipherable to us. It is like leaning over a threshold that looks into the void. We are between the unknown and nothingness.”

Abstract painting in shades of white and black. White brushstrokes coming down from top. Black brushstrokes across bottom half, starting to mix with white in the middle.

Three Poems by Gerardo Arístides Rivodó
translated from the Spanish by David M. Brunson

me acostumbraré al presagio
de una casa vacía
al vuelo que dibujas
sobre cielos penitentes
a la rotura de un pájaro

REVIEWS

Talking to Ghosts at Parties book cover

“Your Eyes In the Darkness”
A Review of Rick White’s Talking to Ghosts at Parties
by Chase Erwin

White drags the reader, as if by the collar, through moments in time and space that reflect and refract each other, both literally and thematically.

Impossible Belonging Cover

Impossible Belonging by Maya Pindyck
reviewed by Barbara Schwartz

Lyrical, imagistic, playful, profound, Maya Pindyck’s new collection of poems, Impossible Belonging, celebrates abundance, welcoming Dickinson’s nobody and Whitman’s multitudes.

CULTURE

Open books layered over each other cover the entire page.

Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022

This year, we’d like to specially feature our amazing friends at Brilliant Books, who style themselves “your local, long distance bookstore.” Though they feature a brick-and-mortar store in Traverse City, Michigan, Brilliant Books distinguish themselves as being one of the largest independent online book retailers in the country, and a crucial example of success in […]

Illustration by Reginald Bathurst Birch from pg 153 of “Little Lord Fauntleroy” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, New-York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886

Little Lad-ification
by Ella Gray

A 2007 Starburst commercial introduced the world to the Little Lad, a caricature of an old-timey foppish boy. The Little Lad dances about, tapping his toes and proclaiming his love for berries and cream.

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Recently Published

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    by L. I. Henley
  • Resonance
    by Ginny Bitting

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