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.
Main Content
POETRY
Roost Profusion
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
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 […]
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
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.”
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
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.”
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
“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
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 […]
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.
