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 […]
Poetry
“6.9,” “6.1,” and “1.4”
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,” […]
My grandma spent her first five years in an orphanage
by Dani Austin
My grandma spent her first five years in an orphanage My grandmas didn’t have grandmas. I use my tender, silvered fingers to light Frankincense while my grandma Erika labors to die, and my smoldering, grieving lungs inhale big. I use my tender, silvered fingers to light my first cigarette, outside the neighborhood bar and my […]
i love organ donors
by Casey Harloe
i love organ donors echo chambers a hike birth vlogs hour-long mortality podcasts ad-free spiraling in the silent snow white cells my small capacity to process the pixels of this sharpening world sending nerve signals like– I try not to question myself compilations most frantic 911 calls […]
Transcolonial Poem
by hanta t. samsa
As an X-ray of U.S. culture, this micro chapbook reveals the violent interiorities of nature preserves, technological advances, and heteronormative ideals.
Margins | Triptych
by Donna Tang
Margins | Triptych DONNA TANG is a Việt American poet based in Los Angeles, CA. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Cotton Xenomorph.
Lawn, Revisited
by Katherine James
LAWN, REVISITED Everyone’s decided to remodel. Past three orange dumpsters parked at the curb, one house is mid-facelift (new windows, paint job, glossy front door) while another’s backside is being built up, Tyvek covering the yard’s sunny slope. Easier and easier, it seems, to make a cosmetic change, to delight in paint chips and trimmings […]
Self-Portrait with Immortality
by Kurt David
Self-Portrait with Immortality I’m bewildered by anyone eager to live fast given I strenuously object to the idea of dying young. Ask anyone. I hardly drive the speed limit, I have never once drunk a cup of coffee, and I believed my mother when she told me the half-finished cigarette fished out from the bottom […]
Neat Panic
by Julia Mallory
Through photosynthesis and the siren song, these poems are written for an alchemical future, one that calls for ‘a third thing’ beyond records of atrocity and poison.
The Life You Ruin May Be Your Own
by Jeremiah Moriarty
They say this war will be fought in the air but it’s finished in these uninsured teeth and a rage for sweets. I reach for a reason, the unified theory of my own unrealized potential, and maybe it’s no more complicated than believing a lie someone told me about myself. A specialness. Self-made sucker. How […]
