This poem was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The older you get, the less likely someone will want to see you naked. Stretch less. Don’t give into the desire to stroll through walls because it’s a long fall to the earth’s core. Remember that […]
Michael Meyerhofer
MICHAEL MEYERHOFER’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae (“damned memory”), won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. He is also the author of a fantasy trilogy. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, please visit www.troublewithhammers.com.
WHAT MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
STATE OF THE UNION
by Michael Meyerhofer
All the news is talking about the lack of surgical masks and ice cream trucks for the dead, how many grandfathers need help to breathe, but today, I can’t seem to stop wondering how oranges smell when they’re burning. For that, too, is something I’ve never known, having missed my one chance to walk a […]
WATCHING MY MOTHER BAKE
by Michael Meyerhofer
Strangest of all was the knife, how gingerly she pushed it through the soft raw crust of the pie freshly-formed on the oven’s surface, preheat already rising in waves, her glance warning me not to touch— the same woman who decided, a week before my seventh birthday, to have me circumcised […]
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 […]
No Oasis
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 […]
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 Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams Letter to Laurena Amy Gigi Alexander From Lost to Loved in Bihar Robert Cowan Close Call […]
