My grandma spent her first five years in an orphanage My grandmas didn’t have grandmas. I use my tender, silvered fingers to light Frankincense while my grandma Erika labors to die, and my smoldering, grieving lungs inhale big. I use my tender, silvered fingers to light my first cigarette, outside the neighborhood bar and my […]
My grandma spent her first five years in an orphanage
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2024
by MAYDAY Staff
Murder mysteries. True crime. New works by Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, and Kristin Hannah. Romantasy, YA romance, and frankly all around too much romance to read. 2024 provided so many amazing and enticing books that there’s no way any of us could possibly read them all in one year. But just in case your to-read […]
I Have Forged My Own Man
by Anupam Singh/अनुपम सिंह, translated from the Hindi by Areeb Ahmad
I Have Forged My Own Man (from मैंने गढ़ा है अपना पुरुष, राजकमल प्रकाशन, 2022) Resting an elbow on his thigh, I am smoking a cigar. I have hidden my autumn in his hat. All the heroines are jealous of me for how could I forge my own man. I said—he is not a […]
i love organ donors
by Casey Harloe
i love organ donors echo chambers a hike birth vlogs hour-long mortality podcasts ad-free spiraling in the silent snow white cells my small capacity to process the pixels of this sharpening world sending nerve signals like– I try not to question myself compilations most frantic 911 calls […]
They Were My Loved Ones
by Imad Kadhum Abdulla, translated from the Arabic by Fatimah Abdulridha
They Were My Loved Ones I am a stranger amongst you. The war has eaten most of my loved ones, and fear has exiled the rest. Because I am lonely, I have mysterious hobbies. I now fish in the busses for the employed single ladies, I sit next to one of them and pretend to […]
Chika at Work
by Chidima Anekwe
Chika at Work When Chika Okeke saw a fat brown cockroach scurry across the checkout counter, she was reminded of Gregor Samsa. When Chika Okeke read The Metamorphosis for the first time, she managed to develop a dark secret crush on Gregor’s character. How tragic and tortured he was. If he had been real, and […]
Margins | Triptych
by Donna Tang
Margins | Triptych DONNA TANG is a Việt American poet based in Los Angeles, CA. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Cotton Xenomorph.
Eat, Love and Split
Xiangli Pan, translated from the Chinese by Xiaoming Shan and Siyi Kang
Eat, Love, and Split Lan Ting Hui is a restaurant that has been open for twenty years in the city’s center, specializing in Cantonese cuisine. Cantonese cuisine has always held a special place in the hearts of Shanghainese. While other regional cuisines come and go like a merry-go-round, Cantonese cuisine consistently ranks among the top […]
Lawn, Revisited
by Katherine James
LAWN, REVISITED Everyone’s decided to remodel. Past three orange dumpsters parked at the curb, one house is mid-facelift (new windows, paint job, glossy front door) while another’s backside is being built up, Tyvek covering the yard’s sunny slope. Easier and easier, it seems, to make a cosmetic change, to delight in paint chips and trimmings […]
Self-Portrait with Immortality
by Kurt David
Self-Portrait with Immortality I’m bewildered by anyone eager to live fast given I strenuously object to the idea of dying young. Ask anyone. I hardly drive the speed limit, I have never once drunk a cup of coffee, and I believed my mother when she told me the half-finished cigarette fished out from the bottom […]
