I approached the truck like I had never seen one before. I didn’t drive but I had seen a lot of people turn a key to make a car start. I wished I could do that to the truck. It would take a long time to get warm and melt the ice that made it stuck where it was.
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Helsinki
Chainsaws, Monarchs and Milkweed
by Bob Meszaros
A day and night of wind and rain: the big oaks fall; we hear each snap, each crash into the weed-filled pond. All morning long wood chippers and chainsaws scream, turning fallen panoplies of leaves and limbs to mounds of dark brown mulch. Tree trunks, delimbed and cut to length, now line the […]
Nothing New in the West
by Clement Obropta
The Old West is an invention, as fake as a ride at Disneyland. It’s a desert filled with paradoxes.
My Beloved Addresses Me with One Last Pastoral1
by Michaela Mayer
“the lips of the lake / produce no fruit”
Three Prose Poems
by Dag T. Straumsvåg, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin
Today the warden has come to visit. He hands me a napkin with a color print of “The Storming of the Bastille” on one side, an escape plan on the other.
PostCardPoems
by Clark Lunberry
“Featuring my deceased father’s bequeathed collection of postcards, with retrieved fragments of language found in a shredded copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past”
Mẹ Thiêng Liêng để trong bụng
by Tam Nguyen
To dream in your Mother Tongue / and stuffed, / consider it a success; // regardless of what it means.
Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year
Looking for book recommendations? To celebrate the end of the year, the MAYDAY editorial staff shares the books they read and revisited in 2021.
Murmurations (I): First Memory of Birds
by Heather Bartel
Is a family portrait still a family portrait when a family is missing the mother?
Mother and the Flowers
By Jacqueline Schaalje
Nine out of ten times, Mother hypnotized flowers not to sneeze. She taught other housewives to branch their spitzes, stick them out so they would all be prim donnas. Irksome they sprinkled pollen. Behind her elbow, they called her shrew and harridan. Minimalized in ro- tation, she peppered her devotees. Their landslip murk swelled with […]
