• 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

In Defense of My Yankee Boyfriend
by Rachel Stempel

February 18, 2021 Contributed By: Rachel Stempel

Couple
Image by Anna Prosekova from Pixabay

in defense of my yankee boyfriend

 

i want nothing

more than randomized curvature

from yours then his then yours again

 

feign my line of questioning to drain

chromosomal sacks of malcontent from every whatever

i spit to flame.

 

from the underbelly i settle hard

swallows gauzed in sweat or other. i carve myself anew

& instinctively age five years to spite myself:

 

how liberals claim territory

with partially digested rage. in our crustacean romance

i let it happen.


RACHEL STEMPEL is a genderqueer Jewish poet and educator. They were a finalist in the 2020 New Delta Review Chapbook Content, longlisted for the 2020 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize, and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Nasiona, New Delta Review, The Journal, Penn Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: February 18, 2021

Further Reading

ROUNDTABLE RESPONSES TO “SOME DARKER BOUQUETS”

: :  V. Joshua Adams : :  Joe Amato : :  Robert Archambeau : :  Tim Atkins : :  Robert Baird : :  John Beer : :  John Bradley : :  Stephen Burt : :  Scott Esposito : :  Annie Finch : :  Bill Freind : :  Daisy Fried : :  Johannes Göransson : :  Mark Halliday : :  John Latta : :  David Lau : :  Eric Lorberer […]

MAYDAY Magazine: Issue 4 Summer 2011

F E A T U R E S Aleksandra Bogdanova в е з д е photographs David Kirby & Barbara Hamby SOUL MAN: LIFE IN RUSSIA, THEN AND NOW     essay and photographs Jorge Volpi & Okla Elliott WAYS OF EXPLORING THE WORLD     an interview with Jorge Volpi (English and Spanish version) Jorge Volpi SEASON OF […]

TRENY #7 (ON THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER, URSZULA) by Jan Kochanowski (translated by Leonard Kress)

Hangars draped with clothes you’ll never wear; they miss the warm touch of your body. Moths will soon begin to feed upon that cloth; what rhetoric will persuade me now to clear your closet out?  The iron sleeps beside the starch, ribbons remain wrinkled and knotted under the golden clasp…Flowers on your dress, potted in […]

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • Caterpillar by Dragana Mokan
    translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
  • Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
  • Warrior
    by Lane Falcon
  • Inside the Kaleidoscope
    by Jane O. Wayne
  • Two Poems by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
    translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • I Know Who Orville Peck Is
    by Robin Gow
  • Warrior
    by Lane Falcon
  • 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.