• 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

The Neighbors Talk About Our Adoption
by Joseph Mills

July 1, 2014 Contributed By: Joseph Mills

i. The Old Woman on the Right

She says that we’ve done a good thing
that our daughter is lucky, and we’ll be
blessed, and I want to say, Fuck you,
you racist old bat. I want to say,
Aren’t you afraid about the nigger music
that will come from our house now?
After all, you said that’s why you stopped
teaching dance classes because so many
of your students were listening to it.
I want to say, None of us are blessed.
We’re trying to get by, day to day,
with as much grace and balance and joy
and generosity as we can, but I don’t
say any of this. I say we’re the ones
who are lucky. I say I hope the crying
doesn’t bother her.  I say it looks like rain.

ii. The Old Woman Down the Street

She asks why we couldn’t get
a white baby, and I’m tempted to say,
Bad Credit, or, They were all out.

Instead I ask, Why would we
want one?, and we stare
at one another, both puzzled.

iii.  The Young Woman on the Left

“It’s funny how she smells black,”
the neighbor says, as she holds the baby.
“They just smell different,” she marvels,
and we explain it’s a starchy smell,
like a potato, because of the soy formula.
We take our daughter back, making a note
to pay attention to the unexpected odors
coming from people we thought we knew.

iv.  But All the Others

They bring casseroles and soups.
They say how gratifying it is to have
children in the neighborhood again.
They laugh, sing, and offer to babysit,
and, they too are obsessed with color.

Pink, pink, pink, a daughter arrives,
and suddenly everything, clothing
and cakes, toys and trikes, come in
pink, a celebration and a world seen
as pink, pink, pink, pink, black, pink.

Return to table of contents for Issue 8 Summer 2014.

You May Also Enjoy Reading...

  • Excerpts from shadowslongshoreman by José Daniel García
    (Translated from Spanish by Jesse Tangen-Mills)

    Day is a cooling ember. Before it gets dark as the well that engulfs the sun and retains its water, I will describe fractals with my finger over the ashy skin of dusk. Seashells swept…

  • 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…

  • Anna Greene
    by Janet Joyner

    Anna’s domain was the wash, which doesn’t sound like much, but took an entire empire of terrain. The back yard for The Pot, on its three legs, above The Fire, bordered by The Tubs. One…

  • 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…

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2014

Further Reading

October by Theodore Worozbyt

On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has […]

The Body by Ellen Elder

At 42 I woke with one breast in a single        suitcase in the cemetery of bell towers We were lucky in a ghost fog I miss you since I’ve lived bone    atoll     lonely I told Ellen it will kill me this time I said, Take the cats,    too I’m worried. You’re a […]

Winter by Jasna Dimitrijević
translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox

Since I moved away to a bigger city, I seldom come back home. Only for holidays and the anniversaries of a few people’s deaths.

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
  • 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 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.