Contributed By: Paul Adler
The blurred cypress
has its own quiet math
as you speed divine
with the white tongue
of a cloud descending
to lick a strip mall.
Motion is a means
to forget, so that each
fluorescent burst
of brush is erased,
so that all night cities
are replaced by brighter
versions of themselves.
A small benevolence,
like the song of a bird
just before it alights.
Look, the lake hurries
to erase our image.
Return to table of contents for Issue 9 Summer 2015.
Pretend we are not dying and that the rocking horse remembers all our laughter as if to love were always to be recorded. Families of stars separate in the sky and holding you I remember…
When we decided to co-edit an issue of MAYDAY Magazine dedicated to nonfiction, we knew we wanted to see as wide a range as possible. We were particularly interested in work that pushes or blurs the boundaries…
I heard my hands were yellow, and in the lines I could feel deeper, like tea I never knew what any of that means if colors have smells then yellow lingered in front of my…
this dangerous habitual criminal, I fingered soles & pounded leather, shaping shoes by smell as much as by the shapes my hands rested in when their force reached the limit set by material resistance my resistance…
The dark and quiet, short-lived both, each a little hang-up, the line’s tiny death. The light stops just enough to blanket the soup bowl, the afghan’s tatters, the stopped clock, the slide of magazines to the dusty floor. As if the pause whispers departure, the assurance strong as water moving, that it all leaves for […]
A day and night of wind and rain: the big oaks fall; we hear each snap, each crash into the weed-filled pond. All morning long wood chippers and chainsaws scream, turning fallen panoplies of leaves and limbs to mounds of dark brown mulch. Tree trunks, delimbed and cut to length, now line the […]
Who gets this little, witty book just sanded smooth with pumice stone? You, Cornelius, since you put a premium on nonsense— like way back when you tried to cram, bold man, all time into three volumes: a tricky and exhausting art. So take this little jest, it’s yours; and pray the Muse will help this […]
