Who among us hasn’t wanted to kill the sweetest thing?
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POETRY
Absent
by Susanna Lang
I have been missing from this year’s spring.
Witness to the winter aconite and snowdrops, the first daffodils,
but not the tulips or hyacinths.
MAYDAY “Editors’ Choice Award” Interview with Winning Micro Chapbook Author Ja’net Danielo
An interview with the winning Micro Chapbook author Ja’net Danielo on the inspiration and process behind This Body I Have Tried to Write: “With these poems, I very much wanted to convey that illness, disability, loss, and grief are not physical and emotional circumstances that happen to a body but are ever-evolving processes held within the body.”
FICTION
Awkward Little Creatures that Flail About, 1956
by John Brantingham
it’s early June twilight, the bats just now coming out and they stand awkwardly on the gravel of the driveway, crunching it back staring up at the little creatures that flail about until Henry asks Clyde what he wants, which is natural enough but said in a little punk tone that Clyde wants to slap out of his mouth
In the Kingdom of Toads & Bones
by Rick White
– CONTENT WARNING: Animal Abuse –
In the mornings — before school — there was always tea. China cups, whistling kettle, hot metal stove. Warm smell of butane, blackened matches, crunch of buttered things. Now there is only steam. It pools on every surface and spit-trickles down black windowpanes, shiny tears.
NONFICTION
Geranium
by Brittany Price
My mole has gone to Arkansas for analysis. I think: it’s been to Arkansas with me before. I think: it’s the first time my mole’s gone anywhere alone.
Q&A with Novelist, Memoirist, and Nonfiction Contest Judge
Darin Strauss by Elliott Bueler
“Memoir is not quite a record of a life; it’s a record of your memory about some part or parts of your life.”
TRANSLATION
Two poems from Mes forêts (My Forests) by Hélène Dorion
translated from the French by Susanna Lang
we hear the song
of fracture and desire
body like the tide going out
pale boat
lost in its night
Winter by Jasna Dimitrijević
translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
Since I moved away to a bigger city, I seldom come back home. Only for holidays and the anniversaries of a few people’s deaths.
REVIEWS
“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 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
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.
Sex, Youth and Power in Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir
by Megan Jones
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is a novel with, as is increasingly prevalent in modern literary fiction, an “unlikable female narrator.” But her unlikability stems from her refusal to sugarcoat the realities of aging and its attendant loss of power.
