• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

MAYDAY

  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • Nonfiction
    • Contests
  • Translation
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • About
    • Submit
      • Contests
      • Contest Winners
      • MAYDAY:Black
    • Open Positions
    • Masthead
    • Contributors

Aging, and Outside Again, and For Quite a While Laughing
by Steven Ostrowski

August 11, 2022 Contributed By: Mark Rosalbo, Steven Ostrowski

This piece was nominated for The Best of the Net.

 "Fibonacci" by Mark Rosalbo
Fibonacci by Mark Rosalbo

Stumbling along 

the river’s       slick bed

a boy in his   sixties

in a wood                 without time 

under a limb-screeded   sky 

brown-tawned     

twined

and tangled down 

in depths of timber 

autumn   blowing a leafy 

kiss to 

creeping winter.

*

This morning he’d    breathed 

the death before      death 

that                           wakes us 

and      now,   restored

he remembers a                    joy 

in the yester-marrow of his bones:

a sweet danger 

peeks 

from fathoms of wood

crows on low limbs 

caw 

in the sneaking loom of dark

secret 

tameless 

life 

teeming:

once more,

his 

wild 

alone


STEVEN OSTROWSKI is a poet, fiction writer, painter and teacher. His work appears widely in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. He is the recent winner of the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Prize for his poetry manuscript, Persons of Interest. He’s also the author of five previously published chapbooks–four of poems and one of stories. He and his son Ben are authors of a full-length collaboration called Penultimate Human Constellation, published in 2018 by Tolsun Books. His first novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone, is forthcoming from Lefora Books. He is a Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.

MARK ROSALBO is an actor, composer and painter. He grew up in Leeds, Maine, and now lives in Vermont with his wife and five children. He graduated from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. More of his work can be seen here. 

Filed Under: Featured Poetry, Poetry Posted On: August 11, 2022

Further Reading

SUMMER by Robert Walser (translated by Daniele Pantano)

In summer we eat green beans, peaches, cherries and melons. In every sense nice and long the days form a sound. Trains travel through the country, flags flap merrily on rooftops. How nice it is in a boat surrounded by gradual heights. The high peaks still wear snow, flowers give fragrance. On the lake you […]

JAM MADE OF LOVERBERRY from recipes of metamtextosis by Serge Segay (translated by Alex Cigale)

carefully comb over the loverberry sew as to seminally manhandle bare-breast. ectomize the pit-joints and the unripe bare-breasts prepare the scratch-pot and carefully immerse in it the loverberries lightly stir the com-pot and let it loverrise. remove the lidlove and squeezelove to loveliness per 1 loverton of loverberries 1 lovegram of sugarlaugh, ½ glasstick bitchbrew. […]

MAYDAY Magazine: Issue 1 Spring 2009

  FEATURED ARTIST David-Baptiste Chirot NECESSITY IS THE MOTHERFUCKER OF INVENTION thoughts on the delete button THE NEW EXTREME EXPERIMENTAL AMERICAN POETRY a gallery featuring the visual works of poet, artist, and human rights activist David-Baptiste Chirot Jared Schickling, David-Baptiste Chirot FINDING THE ROOOT an interview conducted by Jared Schickling with David-Baptiste Chirot that will […]

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
  • Warrior
    by Lane Falcon
  • Inside the Kaleidoscope
    by Jane O. Wayne
  • Two Poems by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
    translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Warrior
    by Lane Falcon
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Business


Reprint Rights
Privacy Policy
Archive

Engage


Open Positions
Donate
Contact Us

Copyright © 2023 · New American Press

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.