MAYDAY

EUCALYPTUS GLOBULUS
by MK Francisco

Contributed By: ,

Painting of a blond person's head and neck, with the left side of their face obscured in shadow.
“Blue” by Carolyn Schlam

Everything we see hides another thing. A cure for bad air. Revisionary highway screens. Fruit
disguised for health and protection. When the fringed flower buds, white threads burst through
its cap. Bark sheds to its raw underlayers, then holds the kindling for firestorms. Married under
the deadspace canopy, we watched the wine go to your head. You crushed a champagne glass
wrapped in a cloth napkin on the hardpan soil mixing pastjoy with futuresorrow and the trees
emitted a blue haze into the underworld. You wore your living into the ground, wrong about the
mouth. Highly susceptible to flame, burning freely up to your crown.

MK FRANCISCO lives in Seattle, Washington. A graduate of the University of Washington MFA program, her work has appeared in Fence, Santa Clara Review, Quarterly West, and Puerto del Sol. Her book Insects of the Data Lake is forthcoming from Inverted Syntax.

CAROLYN SCHLAM is an award-winning artist working in ink, oil, collage, and glass, and the author of four published books on art: The Creative Path, The Joy of Art, The Zen of Art, and More Joy of Art.

Further Reading

Three Film Treatments by Vladimir Mayakovsky
(Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale)

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: A collection of Mayakovsky’s writing on film, KINO, appeared posthumously in the USSR in 1937, and the constructivist influence of film on the structure of his own poems is evident throughout, as in his major work “Cloud in Trousers” (1915) which incorporates elements of film narrative suh as dissolves, ellipses, and parallel plots. In his […]

Persian Night
by Douglas Cole

She placed a cup of the hot elixir on the counter before me. On the surface of the cup little dragonfish swirled around like visual laughter. I felt my stomach tighten and my heart speed up. Here we go . . .

The Right Way Home
by Deborah Flanagan

All night a knife sleeps in the sand, next to a monk eating an onion in the desert. The knife slices through the onion’s delusions. The monk extracts knives of various shapes and sizes from his chest, throat, shoulder; wipes off each one, dabs at the blood. He is so hard on himself. The knife […]

Skip to content