for my ill brown daughter thap. thap. thap. hey there fever girl. hey there ’s water running down your chest, wind slapping your window, hey there fever girl, I hear you keep your eyes in a brown paper […]
for my ill brown daughter
The Gravel Path of Belief, Non-Belief, and the Ambiguous In-Between
by McKenzie Watson-Fore
This essay is written by MAYDAY magazine’s Critic in Residence for Spring 2025. Sharp bits of gravel poke through my leggings into my thighs. Chilly autumn air wafts from the moonlit surface of the Big Thompson River to where I am sitting in the middle of the path. Flecks of cigar paper cling to my […]
Review: Virginia Bell’s Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around
by Brian Satrom
There’s a moment in Virginia Bell’s poem “The Invention of Walking” where the speaker’s son shares with her his observations of how humans walk: “…some like windows opening out // or in, some like puppets dangling— / he imitates to show me, then he imitates // me, my Neanderthal arms swinging” (p. 39). It’s an […]
Persephone watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Persephone watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer I, too, have known the dark chocolate thrill of a kiss against the wall of a mausoleum. Our hunger pangs caused us trouble — the semiotics of leather jackets, animal prints. Night smudges the lines, sexual and otherwise. I know how lonely it is to grow beside a lover […]
Tilda and I Are Cast in a Play, and it’s Called Ode to a Murmuration of Starlings, and It Dabbles in Plagiarism, but That’s To Be Expected Because This is a Dream
by Carrie Strand Tebeau
Tilda and I Are Cast in a Play, and it’s Called Ode to a Murmuration of Starlings, and It Dabbles in Plagiarism, but That’s To Be Expected Because This is a Dream Act 1 Scene 1 Inside of a dream, on an eerily familiar old high school stage with musty velvet curtains. Haven’t you been […]
Lesson
by Charles Malone
When I ask my freshmen to read Sontag, it seems her ambiguity throws them off. Or, perhaps the precision of her questions: What is a photograph anyway and what does it do; what does it do now—now that we are feathered in them? Perhaps images are not a covering but an invasion—we are pierced with […]
Motherless Mothers and the Daughters They Bear
by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Motherless Mothers and the Daughters They Bear I mother myself gentle because my mother’s hands were rough, cracked, and ruby ringed. When her mother died, she kept all the jewelry and left me nothing. Maybe when your mother never mothers you, it makes you a hoarder. Mother’s Day commemorative plates from the 70s to the […]
The Day When the Sun was Brighter than Ever
by Gouri Mehra
The Day When the Sun Was Brighter Than Ever On a sticky June morning, when the sun is brighter than ever, I hold onto my mother’s free hand as we make our way through streets lined with people, vehicles, cattle, more people. Turning left into a narrow opening, she follows the herd (of people, not […]
Leaving the Cusp
by Sayantani Roy
Leaving the Cusp In a grotto of debdaru trees, Father sits with novitiates, boys slightly older than us but still in their teens. These are the sprawling grounds of a seventeenth century church on the banks of the Hooghly River near Kolkata. Father, a stern Romanian in his thirties, speaks fluent Bengali and is perpetually […]
The Mirror Operator
by Sarah Mullens
This story won first place at the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest. A logic is an attempt to understand when one statement follows from other statements, and why. Logic is not a settled body of knowledge, but a domain of inquiry, in which we encounter different logics for different purposes. Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to […]
