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 […]
Featured Poetry
Review: Virginia Bell’s Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around
The Flea
by Jessica Q. Stark
THE FLEA is a lyrical and critical meditation, using the flea as a parasite and marketplace to morph into a monstrous, grieving artifact. We enter an intimate yet exhilarating site for examining consumption and digital accumulation, where Vietnamese histories and diasporic fugitivity interweave with the detritus of late capitalism.
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 […]
Our Sodden Bond
by Kelly Gray
OUR SODDEN BOND manifests narratives with a spiritual pulse from survival and play as liberation.
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 […]
Sleepwalking
by Maura Modeya
In SLEEPWALKING, the voice operates in a register of intimate defiance in the liminal space, confrontational yet matter-of-fact.
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 […]
“6.9,” “6.1,” and “1.4”
by Chris Santiago
6.9 (Infantry Patrols: Attacking Houses) Darkness is hard to control it makes too much noise barking at Venus at churches and their corneas of fired glass better to let the lead fulfill its rapturous purpose 6.4 (Infantry Patrols: Feeding the Personnel) The cure for melancholy is a good tussle. The cure […]
Erasure Poetry as Anti-Imperialism: Chris Santiago Interviewed by Xander Gershberg
by Chris Santiago
In April of 2025, Milkweed Editions will release Chris Santiago’s highly anticipated second poetry collection Small Wars Manual, which Kaveh Akbar calls “a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.” Alongside MAYDAY’s feature of three poems included in the collection (“6.9,” […]
