• 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

One Theory of Hell (Albrecht Dürer’s Harrowing) by Thom Dawkins

April 1, 2012 Contributed By: Thom Dawkins

Jesus looks like he’s been training, getting cut
for the day he’ll dig through the dirt, stooping
to save the folks who went below. Suppose him

un-emaciated, un-crucified, gone underground
to undermine these muppets shouting back at him,

bending low to pull their prisoners aside.
In this hell, the well-dead German sketches
Louis Armstrong cheeks on a beast who blows

his horn from milked-out tits, his shofar turned
into a hideous ploughshare. In this hell, you have
to know where you stand, and I must confess,

the demons down here are merely fat monsters,
nothing so furry I would fear them, not so demonic
I would not protect them from any man or savior.

Return to table of contents for Issue 5 Spring 2012

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: April 1, 2012

Further Reading

GNOMIC SAVIORS: EDITORS ON EDITING – WHAT IS THE PLACE OF POLITICS IN LIT MAGS?

Okla Elliott: Since we’ve hit economics and corrective missions, it might be appropriate to talk about the place of politics in literature.  It strikes me that American authors are so often unwilling to engage with anything political, whereas European, Latin American, and African authors do so almost constantly.  I’ve even gotten the sense from many writers […]

Contributor Bios for Issue 8 Summer 2014

Issue 8 Summer 2014 HANNAH DELA CRUZ ABRAMS received the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has also been accorded a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Oxford American, Waccamaw, and Southern […]

Changing
by Erinn Seifert

You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather’s old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded driveway in the middle of the last dark hour before dawn broke. The pine trees buzzed with morning birds and […]

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
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • 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.