a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished — Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” not far off / a refinery flares methane. targets scatter at a rifle’s clap & clamor. another empty silo at dusk & nothing / to be done about it. tonight the night dismantles / into its constitutional elements. white […]
Poetry
Index of Unfinished Things
from Leafmold
by F. Daniel Rzicznek
Blue jays peel out their autumn / tongues for you. Juncos plunge from winter feeders just to / crack their wings in your presence. The bodies show no / bruises yet are broken all the same.
Grief
by Andrew Vogel
Even knowing the falls are out there somewhere in the woods, patiently hewing the gorge open, a walker could mistake its grind for the shred of the wind through old timber; might forget the heft of the stair-cased rock and the sheets and mists steadily spalling these hills down to a fat delta; would invite […]
A Footprint in the Ashes of Time
by Dmitry Blizniuk, translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov
If it wasn’t for our inborn optimism –
we drop coins into the sea, plant pear trees that are going to grow for centuries –
understanding of reality would burn us
like a match may burn poplar fluff
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 […]
March Madness Flash Fiction Contest!
The top 16 contenders will be selected by MAYDAY fiction editors and the winners will be determined by popular vote on social media beginning March 14.
My Beloved Addresses Me with One Last Pastoral1
by Michaela Mayer
“the lips of the lake / produce no fruit”
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.
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 […]
