Splitting Outside Albuquerque, you pulled over your father’s Bronco to look for fossils. I wanted to go to Georgia’s museum, to stand in a room of her pistils and study how she opened things. You led me down a ravine, one hand on mine the other on a chisel in your back pocket, told me […]
Poetry
Splitting and Impatient Love Poem
Purple Rain and Queerspawn Creation Myth
by Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal
“Once, I was a boy. / Tonight, there is a sunset.”
A sweet memory of summer and Poem for the body politic
by Kacper Bartczak
Translated from the Polish by Mark Tardi
the bright panels of the horizon box are within reach
in full light the organism enters a state of self-emission
Half Sonnet, Doubled
by Mark Tardi
MARK TARDI is a writer and translator whose recent awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. His most recent books are The Circus of Trust, and translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska. His writing and translations […]
Skipping Grandma’s funeral, we see Barbie together
by Dante Fuoco
She was 94 and a bitch—let’s not make this sad. Still, she was your mother. Two hours from Pittsburgh, I lick a $1 Sheetz ice cream cone, improbably delicious amidst an improbably stunning turnpike sunset, when you call with the new fucked up thing: your MAGA brother has Covid—and still, he’s going to the service […]
Two Poems
by Kelsey L. Smoot
“i don’t know the right forks or words to use to make people
understand that i do want them close but i still need to sit facing the exit”
Kelsey L. Smoot’s poems “pepper jack” and “the revolution might not be televised” are lyric invitations to witness — live online at MAYDAY now.
Two Poems by Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi
March 2024 My father calls from Istanbul to tell me he’s on his way to Djibouti There he will wait for a summoning to Somalia Most of my life people asked ___________________ […]
Three Poems
by Abboud al Jabiri
Translated from the Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp
All tears have homes.
I’ve never read about a homeless tear
nor have I met any of them rolling around in the streets
or seen a flood that resulted
from an outpouring of weeping.
Is Pantomime
by J. Parker Marvin
Caustic neurosis of the pantomime king :: there is not a necessity in legend :: we breathe the oxygenated fiction :: a flurry of streams mitigating the gap of the outward push :: the necessity of discard is considered the great lie :: we are asked to masturbate into glass :: but […]
Three Poems by Alfonsina Storni,
translated from the Spanish by Norman Weinstein and Celia Gil Llamas
Zoological garden of clouds I’ve got to sing to the cloud overhead: Here’s to you, tender teddy bear, your lover kisses another cottony cloud, and when you bite it, the cloud disperses. And there’s the snake that chased me in my dreams, this one: and then there’s a pink heron coming from the river, and […]
