• 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

ASMR: You are a Gen Z Theseus
by Beau Brockett

September 2, 2021 Contributed By: Beau Brockett

Minotaur

First line from a Tweet by @ASMRSuggestions

 

There’s a Minotaur in this Ikea,

and it’s ruminating something.

You’re on a Formica counter

wrapped up in your golden yarns,

dreaming of where you’ll be, how

you’ll live, who you’ll be

 

friends with — when you get out.

Each year, fourteen graduates

fall into this Ikea’s cart terminal

like a self-offering.

You did icebreakers.

Some of them took carts. Most

 

shifted their weight from foot to foot,

then left. You can see some stranded

on other countertops, being eaten

by a hunger, yarning about.

Somewhere, plates shudder.

The Minotaur craves something, too.

 

You have spent so much time on toilets

skimming the fine print on instruction packets

for something, mind and legs numbing.

You have loomed into yourself

in so many en suite bathroom mirrors.

Then, at 9 p.m., most lights go out,

 

and you’re forced to give up and sleep

alone. On the counter, you’ve given up

making meatballs without a syllabus.

The stove lights droop, glow brighter.

Start thinking too much, the décor fades,

and this becomes a place of transference,

 

a factory of assembly. The rooms

are so perfectly designed. The décor’s

smiling. The gullets are opening. Buying

a chair — where does that get you?

You’re a bit scared, honestly. You’re shuffling,

fighting the flow, the impending boxed parts.

 

Bookshelves brux. Blood rushes

through the lights. The Minotaur

stops chewing cud. The Minotaur:

You wish you could speak up.

He seems nice. You wonder if he misses

his mom, too. She dropped him off

 

like yours did. The rooms swell.

Everyone jolts up, then notices each other.

You all do that half-wave. You’ve made

eye contact before. The Minotaur

was trying on a nose ring towel handle.

You were imaging ottoman manuals

 

taught you companionship and credit tips.

You wish you could hug him.

You wish you could pitch a blanket tent

and lie down next to him outside it,

look up at the florescent bulb stars,

and talk about life, find comfort

 

in your transmogrifications together.

You’d ask him his real name.

Then you two could make meatballs

just by guessing! And they’d turn out great!

You both could leave through the sliding doors.

Maybe you’d become a reporter.

 

But the curtains flush red.

You hug your precious yarns and risk

a look at the other islanders.

They seem like you. Maybe

you are all doomed voyagers.

Crewmates. The uvulas tinkle. Air-

 

conditioned fog washes over you.

Your peers disappear. You should have said

anything. The PA says you have minutes

to depart. You really want to, but

you’re too tied up. The Minotaur moos.

The thermostats flush saliva.


By day, BEAU BROCKETT works in communications for a Michigan environmental nonprofit. By night, — well, some nights — he reads and writes. He graduated from Albion College’s English department in 2019.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Poetry Posted On: September 2, 2021

Further Reading

LIP by Kathy Fagan

selections from LIP      Eastern Washington University Press, 2009 by Kathy Fagan     ONTOLOGY AND THE PLATYPUS   So which mammalian fuck-up list produced the platypus, produced the bird-billed, flat-foot, erstwhile beavers dressed like ducks for Halloween? Crepuscular and nipple-less, they suckle hatchlings in the changeling dusk— Diaphanously the god-swan boned a married chick and she […]

ANOTHER PIG-KNUCKLE-MOTHER POEM by John Repp

Mountain down to damp emerald moss, wind-bent hemlock, fragrant duff under tent floor, fog the metronomic gusts fail to dissolve, we break out supper—mine lost to memory, Ted’s pickled herring he gulps like a seal, the reek & smacking & cross-eyed, lip-licking contemplation settling me down at the formica table cleared of supper, dishes on […]

Cowards
by Siamak Vossoughi

It seemed like it was always Matt Eastman fighting somebody or Matt Ladreau fighting somebody or the two of them fighting each other.

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • 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
  • Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
    translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
    reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
  • Verge
    by William Cordeiro

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • 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
  • Cool Uncle
    by Emmett Knowlton
  • I Know Who Orville Peck Is
    by Robin Gow
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • 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.