Learning to separate your own interests away from those feelings of, “I should be more like this, I should be more like that”—that’s going to be valuable forever. And not just in writing.
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Comprehension, If Not Closure: A Conversation with Riley Redgate
When All Your Seeds Fail
by Amanda Roth
Try compost – scraps / piled into a heap. The forgotten things / are begging for another life. Let’s say you could / get the dirt to sing.
*
by Simon Perchik
wobbling from some near-by breeze / reaching down as the hillside / where her shadow should be
Four Poems
by Asma Jelassi, translated from the Arabic by Ali Znaidi
we’ve started to disassemble the land mines / and plant roses and poems instead.
Human Sacrifice
by Krista Leahy
Wall, enemy, ally, shadow, tree, a toddler / given freedom to roam, requires one // banana-nut muffin, many hands, 56 / minutes to walk one Brooklyn city block.
I Cried Because You Told Me
by Abdulqader S. Al-Ghamdi, translated from the Arabic by Essam M. Al-Jassim
I recall the prickly pear shrub that never failed to pierce me as I tucked my skinny body behind it, trying to hide…
Unbelong
by Mandira Pattnaik
Did you see a hapless, hunted woman, baby in arms? Her stare’s hollow. // Ahead of her, there’s a slithering line beaded with nowhere people.
2022 Flash Fiction Contest Results!
MAYDAY’s March Madness tournament has come to an end. Congratulations to all sixteen of our finalists! From the start, there could be only one champion.
The Naked and The Damned
by Julia Sirmons
“He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany,” reads the tagline for Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned. It’s an improbable caption for the image below it: a man in drag.
While my Wife Is in the Hospital Recovering from a Stroke
by Richard-Yves Sitoski
There’s nothing to eat but fruit from baskets sent by friends // and I couldn’t care less about the fate of the world.