• 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

Café des Artistes
by Diana Rickard

October 1, 2016 Contributed By: Diana Rickard

Reading about Freud and arguing to myself
about the origin of you-know-what
it felt like I was eating wontons in peanut sauce
with a small-boned girl from a broken home.

It’s in these lopsided interstices you tend
to ingratiate. Across the street windows
are like religious emblems, a collection
lining the joints, swelling exponentially.
Our friends impinge like waiters
and even your derision seems rabbinical.

I still believe in TV shows: the boy,
the jugular, the disaster that happened.
How real, you think, it all must be to me, leaves
too vivid with light, “pretty” and “quaking”
the butter-mashed yams and the movie
Blow Up; the way you said “apoplexy”
angrily and without spitting.

“I don’t want martyrs
— I want convictions!”
a successful man hissed
in the West Village

while you read about “the biological
system of love,” it’s rootedness
in bodies unlike your own,
diffuse with freckles and uninspired.

Your teeth hurt in winter, and each night
you watch a drama of a woman
with hair and clothes similar to mine.

You are orificeless, memorizing chunky words,
bawling about the remoteness
of my subjectivity, building an unwholesome
reliance on the computer’s thesaurus.

Unattached, quietly ill,
you see his face, her face.

 

 

 

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 10 Fall 2016.

You May Also Enjoy Reading...

  • Privilege
    by Allison Blevins

    I’m going to stop coming out in the usual I don’t want to offend you way. I’ll tell the next children’s librarian who asks me my husband’s name about the time a cop held my wife against…

  • Yearning
    by Jennifer Morales

    An animal scared silent, rabbit atremble in the morning grass, belly fur slick to the ground, the ground warming to the hands of sun and light. A salt lick, discovered in a day-to-day field, crusted…

  • The Heights
    by Robin Reagler

    Hoohooooooo a man kneels down before an even more powerful man his hand imagines a cat with lonely fur curtain            seltzer weapon          lover as the train whistle scratches the face of distances a…

  • Contributor Bios for Issue 10 Fall 2016

    Issue 10 Summer 2016 TERRY ADAMS has poems in Poetry, Ironwood, The Sun, Witness, College English, The Painted Bride Quarterly,and elsewhere. He MCs poetry events at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and in La Honda, California. His first collection, Adam’s Ribs, is available from Off…

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2016

Further Reading

Gridlock by Lauren Schmidt

A teenage girl in too-high heels stamps past a line of cars. Held by a stop sign, drivers wait for her patent leather daggers to pass. Her stagger begins to slow: she knows they cannot go until she’s gone. She idles in the crosswalk, stages herself before the cars in a half-deserted plea to be […]

SELF-PORTRAIT IN A POWDERED WIG by Ray De Angelo Harris Sr.

I dress up a lot as a Smurf or Pirate, but right now, I see two elements in wigs: tradition and the perspective required to write soliloquies on hookers, to call class “work-eth shop” and ride up in a horse and robe, with my collar alive in the wind, ruffling the white curls that adorn […]

Do You Know the Way
by Carolyn Boll

No one knew about Linda’s and my apartment in the basement of her parent’s house. It had a galley kitchen and bathroom. In the main room there was a kitchen table covered in coral Formica surrounded by six color-coordinated vinyl and aluminum chairs. There was a fully stocked bar, a TV with an antenna with […]

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
  • Painting to Empower: An Interview with Artist Harmonia Rosales
    by Aya Kusch
  • 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.