• 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

No Oasis
by Michael Meyerhofer

July 1, 2014 Contributed By: Michael Meyerhofer

My mother and I went to a music store
one day when I was nine or ten,
skipping school because of a nervous stomach.
She’d promised to buy me the sheet music
for Man of La Mancha because I’d heard it
in a commercial, liked it, and my father
who was teaching me free weights
had placed her in charge of his paychecks.
On the off chance you’ve read my poems before
you know she’s dead and I’m something
of a melancholic sap, but what I was
just thinking is that I have no idea
what that store was called, what town
it was in or even how she found it
in the age before the internet,
though I can still remember her smile
as I prowled the rows for what I wanted,
maybe puffed up a little, trying to look tough
as I moved between bright aisles of flutes,
entranced by all that sparkle and sheen,
French horns turning in gilded circles.

Return to table of contents for Issue 8 Summer 2014.

You May Also Enjoy Reading...

  • Song
    by Michael T. Young

    The first sentence of a certain history is written near an estuary, in a building with no address, behind the last door, at the end of a hall lined with pinewood paneling. One of those…

  • What the Mind Hungers for
    by Michael T. Young

    There is so much reality it often escapes me. Even at dinner, while chewing root vegetables, the excess bursts from my mouth with each bite. I think it a trickle of beet juice and dab…

  • MAYDAY Magazine: Issue 8 Summer 2014

    EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Paul Crenshaw & Okla Elliott Special Nonfiction Issue FEATURED ARTICLE David Kirby photos by Barbara Hamby Who Made That Wooden Horse, and What’s It Doing on Our Beach? What Greece Needs Now ESSAYS…

  • Quagmire
    by Gary Fincke

    Behind our house, a soft bog Digested things that died there. I tested it with my shoes, Expected hands upraised Or at least a riot of worms. Our nervous dog skittered As if she anticipated…

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2014

Further Reading

When You’re Dead
by Melissa Buckheit

When you’re dead you no longer have to think about the experiences of your childhood, get up morning after morning or cook meal upon meal until you no longer wish to eat. When you no longer wish to eat, you may be dead. I kept a collection of newspaper articles documenting airplane crashes in my […]

BECOMING OCEANIC by Elizabeth Switaj

without burning when everything is heat & sex and can & can’t and Yes & yes cool breath that draws beads of cicada-drenched humidity from where they suffocate your neck can’t be transmitted by nerves called love without getting caught in reflex loops of fuck & fuck eventually we wake to no whether in illness […]

Weeds
by Barbara Schwartz

I think I am my savior’s thoughts, the stubborn beautiful ones / who refuse to go. It’s a temple in here / though I do not know // the prayers.

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • 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
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Warrior
    by Lane Falcon
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
  • 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.