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

MAYDAY

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

Re:
by Todd Osborne

January 1, 2018 Contributed By: Todd Osborne

Sometimes I believe in something like karma,
or not that, exactly, but the idea that if bad
occurs to me, I probably deserve it, like the skinned
knee I received after a jog—in my apartment
complex, looking at my phone, I missed a step
I’d walked down a hundred times. Or, the emails
from a group of Boise soccer parents who want
me to show up at every game—It’s very important.
I don’t want to tell them I’m not their Todd Osborne,
just an impostor with a new Comcast account.
For all the emails or text messages unreplied,
the conversations left unstarted, this is my penance:
find me sitting in bleachers 2000 miles from my home,
sweating in bright blue, praying that this is enough.

 

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 12 Winter 2018.

You May Also Enjoy Reading...

  • Tesserae
    by Hedy Habra

    When I close my eyes   I see the child in me hug the hour hand   licked by the flame of memory emerging   in stark darkness   a faint light filters   through cracks a half-open door…

  • Girondinsville
    by Nick Conrad

    Metered sunshine. Wind rationed, and rain. A heaven for incrementalists, with chaos always just around the corner. Is it any wonder that he had grown too fond of night, of the ruined castles that lined…

  • Inheritance
    by Amy Sawyer

    His untucked shirt hid his belt missing a loop or two. His morning beer kicked in early. My uncle drove six of us in the back of a station wagon. No seatbelts, confident in the…

  • The Fundamental
    by Jesse DeLong

    constants      of physics—       the speed of light, the absol- ute of gravitational    attraction, the weak & the strong forces of our interactions. If we change any of these by the tiniest of amounts, nothing life-like…

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: January 1, 2018

Further Reading

Little Lad-ification
by Ella Gray

A 2007 Starburst commercial introduced the world to the Little Lad, a caricature of an old-timey foppish boy. The Little Lad dances about, tapping his toes and proclaiming his love for berries and cream.

6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan

Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]

No Story
by Himan Heidari

“Once, there was a little girl” no, not a girl, let’s make it a boy this time and wait, this is not a good way to start a story at all.

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • The Best Short Films of 2022
    By: Lisa Ströhm Winberg and Clement Obropta 
  • Ligatureless [an Anatomy]
    by David Greenspan
  • The most punk thing you can’t remember
    by Gion Davis
  • Review: Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala
    translated from the Greek by Peter Constantine
  • Revision
    by Lior Torenberg

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Three Ai Poems
    by Chandra Livia Candiani
    Translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Taboga and Roy Duffield
  • Villain
    by Holly Laurent
  • I Know Who Orville Peck Is
    by Robin Gow
  • You’d Just Be Different, That’s All: Revisiting Catcher in the Rye in 2020
    by Sam Rebelein
  • The most punk thing you can’t remember
    by Gion Davis
  • 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.