• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

MAYDAY

  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • Nonfiction
    • Contests
  • Translation
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • About
    • Submit
      • Contests
      • Contest Winners
      • MAYDAY:Black
    • Open Positions
    • Masthead
    • Contributors

Empress of Ice Cream
by Barbara Schwartz

April 7, 2022 Contributed By: Barbara Schwartz

After by Ann Calandro
After by Ann Calandro

You are trying to hold on
           to sand as seagulls flit and two crabs
                               limp back toward their holes. 

                       The day gasps its bright
           undoing. I’m trying to talk to you
about sex, what’s lost 

after marriage, if you believe in god.
            You say you’re hungry and
                       want some ice cream.

                       Behind the sheer curtain
            by the bar, a woman’s silhouette:
She swirls her long dark hair,

 piles it atop her head,
          then slowly, suddenly completes
           the cones. Strawberry- 

           stained fingers, lips, her red halo
         eyes. Night comes on
sticky as milkfat, quick as blood- 

wine through teeth.
       I remember yesterday’s banquet:
            a pig quartered on a cutting board.  

               Her ears perked as if listening
        to the whistles as women wandered in
with tanned shoulders,

breasts. Under embroidered cloths,
      scraps of charred flesh fell away between
            legs. I drank my tea with milk 

              and thought of the sow
   chained to a stump in the middle
of a greying field. Hunger sneaks up

like two fingers flicking a pink
    succulent moon. I return
        with the top licked off 

        your sugar cone. You say
    you believe in this: my mouth on yours
as our soles disappear in the surf.

 


Barbara Schwartz is the author of two books of poetry, a chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017) and the collaborative collection Nothing But Light with poet, Krista Leahy (forthcoming from Circling Rivers 2022). A finalist for the 1913 Poetry Prize and Barrow Street Book Prize, her hybrid poetry manuscript What Survives is the Fire was selected for Boomerang Theater’s First Flight New Play, and has been included in The University of Miami’s Holocaust Theater Catalog. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Upstreet, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Potomac Review, MAYDAY Magazine, and elsewhere. Barbara is an education consultant and lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

 

Ann Calandro is a writer, mixed media collage artist, and classical piano student. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in print and online literary journals and included in two print anthologies. Her artwork has been published in print and online journals, exhibited in galleries, and awarded prizes. See more artwork at www.anncalandro.webs.com.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Featured Poetry, Poetry Posted On: April 7, 2022

Further Reading

Tag, You’re It (Cyborg Sonnet)
by Jillian Weise

#IfYouGetThis #CripTheVote #SendMeADM #DeafTalent #WithTheNameOf #DisabledAndCute #ThePlaceWhere #ActuallyAutistic #WeSatTogether #DisabilityTooWhite #For26Days #AbleismExists #NotUsExactlyBut #AccessIsLove SEE MORE: Interview with Jillian Weise THE CYBORG JILLIAN WEISE is a poet, video artist, and disability rights activist. Cy’s first book, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, was reissued in a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface. The Book of Goodbyes won […]

UNTITLED a series of prose poems by Antara Datta

Window She came to live with us when I was 12. She would sit at the window with a toothless smile, wrapped in white with breasts that needed no cover or holding up, eyes layered with years, looking at the road outside, longing for home. Perhaps. Big mother. Old mother. Grand mother. She left me […]

Twasday
by Jillian Weise

The first time I slipped between Tuesday and Wednesday, into a Twasday, I saw Amy. She was wearing her tattoos again. I had not seen her in years. She asked me to help her build a casket. She had the hammer and nails. The saw was lying on the ground next to a plank of […]

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • Inside the Kaleidoscope
    by Jane O. Wayne
  • Two Poems by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
    translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
    translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
    reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
  • Verge
    by William Cordeiro

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Cool Uncle
    by Emmett Knowlton
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Painting to Empower: An Interview with Artist Harmonia Rosales
    by Aya Kusch
  • I Know Who Orville Peck Is
    by Robin Gow
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Business


Reprint Rights
Privacy Policy
Archive

Engage


Open Positions
Donate
Contact Us

Copyright © 2023 · New American Press

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.