NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
New Ohio Review is a national literary journal produced by Ohio University’s Creative Writing Program. Now in its eighteenth year, NOR has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and support from the Ohio Arts Council. Work from our pages consistently appears in the Best American series and the annual Pushcart anthology.
Our print issues appear in the fall and spring. We feature online editions in June and December. Our Winter 2024-2025 online issue is here!
The latest winter online exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available! Scroll down to read.
The issue includes art by Leo Arkus, Jordyn Roderick, and Zelda-Thayer Hansen; poems from Baylina Pu, John A. Nieves, Matthew T. Birdsall, Elisabeth Murawski, James Lineberger, Johnny Cate, John Wojtowicz, Shelly Cato, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Erin Redfern, Dustin Faulstick, Madalyn Hochendoner, Michael Derrick Hudson, and Annie Schumacher; fiction from Mary Cross, Ellen Skirvin, Matt Cantor, Noah Pohl, and Teresa Burns Gunther; essays from Jill Schepmann and Lesa Hastings; reviews of work by Anna Farro Henderson, Ron Mohring, and Betsy Brown by Jenna Brown, Kate Fox, and Tessa Carman; and interviews of Jodie Noel Vinson, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Johnny Cate, Arya Samuelson, and Noah Pohl conducted by Clare Hickey (Vinson and Samuelson), Rachel Townsend, Cam Kurtz, and Shelbie Music.
We hope you enjoy.
Thanks for reading,
-The Editors
By Baylina Pu
Featured Art: “Stolen Beauty” by Leo Arkus
I have been looking at images
of AI-generated art all day. Something about
the control in the brushwork
mimics the delirium of a real artist,
though what “real” means anymore
I can’t exactly say. Lately I’ve been
eating rice crackers at midnight
while solving logic problems for fun,
a bad habit. There is something
such that, if it is wet, then
everything is wet. I tell the robot
to paint “Dream of the Red Chamber,”
and it gives me a roomful of blood.
How many photos did it dissect before
it could make that? I mean paintings
garbled into code, the way a prism
reassembles light? I ask the machine
to show me the fifth dimension: what I receive
is a door. Its surrounding walls are made
of something like stained glass, which spreads
lattice-like across the floor and ceiling,
like the brain of something more beautiful
than a living thing. The colors shine metallic,
though if you look closely the shapes
appear distorted, confused. What is the robot saying,
I wonder. Everything it knows, it learned from us.
By John A. Nieves
I used to believe in the tang of orange
Tic-Tacs—that it had anything to do
with oranges. That three bright sugar
pills in my child-hand could shine
up a dark morning. And they did. What
little magic. What’s so easy to miss
so much. I believed rainbows on
window dew hid tiny treasures, that sneezing
while saying someone’s name meant
they were thinking of me, that everything
I loved would stay forever if I took
care of it, if I did my part. I have almost
none of that now: the purple stuffed
rabbit, my two pet Siamese cats, my best
friend across the way, my whole
family. I used to believe music could
change the weather. I’m lying. I still
do. I still believe people attach themselves
to songs they love, creep into their choruses.
This may be literally true in the science
of memory. This may also make me
superstitious. But, O, when I sing
you, I can almost reach. There is no way
there is nothing there.
By Noah Pohl
Featured Art: “Bumblebee” by Leo Arkus
(March 27)
Today, I came to work eleven minutes late. My co-worker Lenny said he didn’t know if he could cover for me, even though he thought I was “cool” and “down to Earth” and “pretty for twenty-four,” whatever the fuck that means.
Lenny is sweaty. He sweats near the hot dogs sometimes, and that’s not cool. I try to avoid Lenny when he’s in one of his moods. He cries loudly in the Target bathroom because of his impending divorce, but he’s also extremely hairy and his eyebrows are out of control. Since his wife left him, he kind of resembles a giant, lumbering piece of sage. I know because I smudged my apartment last night to keep the bad spirits away.
I also made sure my Target Pizza Hut uniform was clean ’cause I dumped Alfredo sauce on myself yesterday like a total dope. It smelled like hot garbage. Then I got quarters from one of the girls at the registers so I could do my laundry. No more free laundry.
I mean, I feel like that’s a metaphor for something, I just don’t know what.
Read MoreBy Matthew T. Birdsall
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be”
-Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5
Uncertainty looms heavy before sunrise.
Dark driving, she calls it, at 5:00 AM
to the hospital for her surgery,
when she mentions losing our dog,
Penny, a few months ago—
anxiously lumping together unknowns—
and I had trouble focusing
but I tried to turn the conversation around
with compliments—her outfit, hair, shoes—
but I shut down when she said,
It’s okay, Dad, I know that living is dying…
Stuck in the white shock of her wisdom
I wanted to say something to redirect us
but I couldn’t decide whether
she was that conscious of her own mortality
or if she was just being a child—
redirecting gravity away from her upcoming operation
toward something more certain.
At the last minute, the operation was canceled.
As we walked out, my daughter took my hand
because she knew I needed it telling me she felt good.
She said she still missed Penny,
and she would miss her as long as she was alive—
me too I said but holding back on diving deeper
trying not to lump together more unknowns,
as we headed home with just enough sun
to get all the way there without headlights.
By Elisabeth Murawski
Featured Art: “Mr. Love” by Leo Arkus
An adult neither liked
nor disliked,
she taught music
appreciation,
played 78s of Verdi
and Bizet.
Teens in letter
sweaters, we were
the children
she didn’t care
to know. A thin
gold band on a red-
nailed finger
declared she’d snagged
a Mr. Love
so long ago we
weren’t even born.
She seemed resigned
as our parents were
to not going
anywhere, tapping
her black shoe
like a metronome
while reckless Carmen
goaded Don Jose,
Radames and Aida
smothered
in the tomb scene.
By James Lineberger
today which is hotdog day
at forest hill methodist i ran into
my old high school lit teacher
from the tenth grade
one of the great influences in my life and it really got to me
while i was waiting in line
to put in my order
and i thought about all the other
teachers i used to have who lived and died maybe never
realizing how much they
had meant to their students and here was
a perfect opportunity
to express my gratitude and not to just any teacher
but miss ruby herself but then huh oh
all of a sudden i thought ohmygod what if
my eyes were playing tricks on me
and it was just some little old lady
that somewhat resembled her so just to make sure
i went over to another former student
wanda she used to be wanda yow
i forget who it was she married but wanda
was one of the volunteers
who was bringing food to people’s tables and i said
wanda is that her is it really her
and wanda said oh yeah that’s ruby all right don’t she
look wonderful but she’s
deaf in one ear i think the good one
is her left but you better hurry
if you want to speak to her she’s already
called her grandson
to come pick her up so i left
my order with wanda and circled around
behind ruby’s table
hoping i could surprise her and leaned down
from the left side
with my face just barely touching her hair
which smelled my god like violets
a really refreshing smell
and there was something else some kind
of perfume from elsewhere and
i don’t know how it happened but i was already starting
to weep it was such a profound
moment for me
and my feelings damn near overtook me
but i managed to get it out even
though my voice was shaking when i said miss ruby
until i had you for a teacher
i didn’t know
what great literature was and i—
but then
i just ran out of words and out of breath
and as i started
to pull away
she reached her hand back and slapped
me right in the face
turning around
with a stare like she had seen a ghost
saying oh goodness jimmy is that you i thought it was
a brown recluse
By Mary Cross
Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick
Sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot that the tar on the road stuck, like Juicy Fruit gum, to the bottom of my tennis shoes, I’d see a mirage in front of me and think of my grandmother—imagine her a painting. She loved the heat in the summer, and she told me that she even chewed a hunk of tar when she was a little girl. I’d imagine her head was a wide stripe of white across a green-colored canvas, and her hips were shimmering shades of red and caramel; but the craziest of all were her lips—they were yellow buttons, the same kind on my spring coat. At night in our room we shared, I’d think of this painting when I’d watch her remove her Junior Petite coffee-colored stockings, rub her shins with the clinical expertise of a practiced masseuse at the Y, then rest her feet in a bucket of Epsom salts, while I studied the gap between my front teeth with her compact mirror. She’d repeat the story about her sixteen-year-old daughter who died; “Molly, there is nothing worse than losing a child.” She kept a lock of her daughter’s hair in the second drawer of her dresser, along with fortunes from Ray’s Chinese takeout. On the night table, her top teeth sat in a jelly jar painted with the outline of Fred Flintstone. Without her dentures, she sounded as if her tongue were swollen.
Read More —for Bam Margera
By Johnny Cate
Modus operandi: grace cut with chaos, every
drop-in a death sentence he’d somehow
skirt and skate off to nollie another day.
If we got our hands on a burned Bam DVD
we’d play it until the player was hot to touch,
until every trick was etched into the mind’s
fish-eye and we were sketched up
with strawberries trying to land one like him.
The kids who by high school couldn’t hit
a heater pitch for shit or cared to run suicides
found a home in the sheet metal half-pipe,
a new American pastime and a hero in
an unhinged prodigy. Jackass came later—
what mattered first was the skating, each
varial and crooked grind a live creative act
that left like a vandal Michelangelo, bank
rails marked with paint, curbs darkened
with candle wax. But the rebellious aesthetic
was just that—aesthetic. A sly disguise for the
same glory, the guttering flame of a single
God-breathed second. Under Bam’s feet,
the deck spun like a plywood electron,
elemental and holy: 360 degrees of don’t-care
that would carry him to self-destructive stardom.
Now, hardly a day goes by that TMZ wouldn’t like
to eat him alive, so I’m pulling up the tape,
posted by a stranger, just to see what I saw
years ago on those long-gone discs: a man
risking blood and bone with total nonchalance,
his soul sliding recklessly, breathlessly diagonal.
By John Wojtowicz
Featured Art: “Pebbles vs. the world” by Leo Arkus
As a kid, I spent Saturday nights
underneath this boardwalk, poking a dollar bill
between cracks, pulling it back
after luring unsuspecting tourists.
Now I’m back around, fixing up a friend’s beach bungalow:
paint-peeling and porch-rotting
on the bay side of town.
I’ve only walked the boards a few times
mostly forgoing views of the ocean
for beer-drenched nights at the Shamrock.
Tonight, a thunderstorm rolls in
and the preacher at the boardwalk chapel
offers shelter to all but those
with a still lit cigarette.
Zombie Crusher and Terrordactyl
don’t let lightening stop them
from barreling over jumps made of beach sand
but the amusement rides have ceased to amuse.
The tram car watches me.
I like riding the Sea Serpent with its upside-down
and backwards thrills;
how for that 1 minute & 48 seconds
it’s hard to think about anything
other than staying alive.
I like the monster trucks too.
The way they flatten.
I put out my Marlboro and take shelter
in the wood-paneled chapel
next to a handlebar-mustached-man
sporting a throwback Hulk Hogan
t-shirt: Hulkamania is running wild, Brother.
I think about how Dolly Parton
made a spoof music video
in which she married Hulk Hogan
after reading in a tabloid
that she was having an affair with a professional wrestler.
“He’s got a headlock on my heart,
it was a take down from the start.”
For Dolly, it’s all fertilizer; she’s a western-
wigged buddha two-stepping through life.
For me, it’s been more of a hot-coal-
hop-skip. The rain slows, thunder booms.
I have no special someone for whom
to buy a pair of custom booty shorts.
I grab a beer before the concessions close,
toss rings on bottles, land quarters
on plates. The unbridled ocean
gives me chills. I think about how sailors
wore earrings worth enough
to cover the cost of their return and burial,
salt-slicked mariners
with no need for gold hoops.
I bend down to pick up a dollar that disappears
before my fingers can grasp it.
I think I want to be buried at sea too;
being decomposed by sea lice
seems more exotic than earthworms.
By Ellen Skirvin
My dad warned us that aliens were watching him before he disappeared. He also had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital five times throughout my sixteen-year lifetime. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors said he vanished in the night. His clothes were left in his dresser. The framed photo of my sister and me left on his bedside table. None of the night nurses saw him leave. There were no tied up sheets found dangling outside his open window. The doctors reminded our family that my dad had admitted himself voluntarily and was free to leave at any time. There was nothing they could do. My mom didn’t seem worried at first. He’d left and come back before. One time he left for almost a week and returned with a pet frog that died the next day. Another time he traveled halfway across the country to tour a NASA museum. He needed space; he’d tell us later. Most of the time he checked himself into the hospital for a long weekend, casually packing his car as if he were leaving for a fishing trip.
Read More
By Shelly Cato
Featured Art: Notes and sketches from “Life as distraction as practice as discovery” by Zelda Thayer-Hansen
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀One Morning Before School
A tricorn hook pierced a night
crawler before
entering a boy’s
thumbnail—
the bone
At the same moment
a grain of grit shifted
into his mother’s left eye
which remained to stick—
twitch
On her cutting board
apple peelings wilted—
and the hound
outside jowled
ham fat
Behind a shed
seldom used for skinning
the boy waited
for his school bus—
nursed blood
from his thumb—believed
in the way his mother
arranged his lunchbox—
believed he would live
to open his lunchbox
that day
By Matt Cantor
It’s been a full year, now.
It’s October 7th.
I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on.
“Don Quixote,” I’ll tell them.
“Hasn’t somebody already written that?” they’ll ask me.
“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to.
Read More
Detail of “I Carry Our Weight: Artifact” by Zelda Thayer-Hansen, photo by Bee Huelsman
By Joanne Dominique Dwyer
This is not a poem about insects of the family Hymenoptera.
It’s not a poem about pounding nails.
It’s not a poem about flashlight tag.
It’s not a poem about famous writers addicted to laudanum.
This is not a poem about the burial of a baby raccoon.
This is not a poem about the core of the sun becoming unstable
and everything going black and cold.
This is not a poem about the definition of Hymenoptera.
Hymenoptera: derived from the ancient Greek words
hymen and pteron—membrane and wing.
This is not a poem begun in silence.
Before dawn the wolf dogs howling inside the pen.
And a 5:30 am text from a man who says another man
entered his bedroom while he slept—
and a threat of beating the intruder to death.
This is not a poem about cannonball splashing.
This is not a poem about the softening and weakening of bones in children.
It’s not a poem about parachutes
It’s is not a poem about being born in a field of horses.
This is not a poem about oxygen.
It is a poem about the migration
of ruby-throated birds and the effects
of artillery on tongues.
By Erin Redfern
Featured art by Jordyn Roderick
At the all-girls school they taught us
don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.
Against my will, I remember this
when I need to take a walk to clear my head.
When I fear the sound of feet, a distance
closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,
my neck for decades bending. On the train
a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me
the Great American Writer; I’ll show you
a man who finds by walking out alone
what freedom is,
and, so, America, I want to be
the kind of woman who walks into night,
a fine rain, her own thoughts.
If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries
and rush of wings from powerlines.
If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees.
If walking is a bodied way of thinking.
If I love a subway map, a screech of trains.
If walking out and back intact is luck.
If I have been a long time without thinking.
If I wanted to go there by myself
thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.
Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”
By Jill Schepmann
Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus
I walk out of class, my mis-spoken and fragmented explanations of the day racing. A greatest hits of my unworthiness as a teacher. I think of earlier in the day, walking around the lake with a friend. The building I’ve just left is called Lone Mountain, which stands on a hill, in a city of hills, dramatic, grand. And I trick myself again into believing that I belong here. Sometimes, Lone Mountain makes me witness the fog coming off the Pacific to swallow San Francisco’s avenues. Sometimes, the glass buildings downtown. Once, on a rainy, windy day, I looked out my classroom window to see two giant cypress trees grown as one split and fall away from each other, their branches pointed skyward until they came to rest in sudden-found angles, fossilized insects on their backs.
As I descend the mountain, I think of going home to my new girlfriend in Oakland. Oakland is also new to me. Susannah is making pasta for us. This caretaking, too, is new. I walk a little quicker thinking of the way she comes to unlock the door when I’m too long finding my keys. Her warm lips. Cupping her elbow in my palm. Her cheek resting against mine. I quicken. I quicken.
Read MoreBy Dustin Faulstick
They had been together ten years when they decided to get on the registry. They had been to a wedding over Labor Day weekend and realized that all of their stuff was shit. They decided, as anyone would, that they might as well collect what they deserved. It started as an adventure. One of them wanted a knife holder. One of them wanted a blender. They had always both wanted a cast-iron skillet. It went on like this until one of them wanted a kitchen organizer. We don’t need a kitchen organizer; we’re not toddlers, one of them said. That one removed the kitchen organizer from the registry. The other one removed the down comforter from the registry: it was a tit-for-tat. It went on like this. Occasionally an item was added, but mostly items were removed: the electric drill; the waffle maker; the geometric-patterned area rug, one of those coffee cups that keeps itself warm. Once there was nothing in the registry, they started in on the stuff they already owned: a broken-down bicycle, a Don Quixote-themed fork-and-spoon wall decoration, a plastic Adirondack chair held together by duct tape. This, too, became a tit-for-tat: an Ikea shelf from one of their sister’s college dormitories, license plates from the states where they used to live, their hospice plants on life support. It went on like this until there was nothing left.
By Madalyn Hochendoner
When a potato you’re frying
hops out of the pan
into the unknown space
between the wall
and the oven
you know it’s gone
forever.
And sure you could
get the broom
and do a blind sweep,
see if you could rustle-up
more than a disturbing
amount of hair,
but you won’t.
At least not today, but really
not ever
because you’ve already moved on.
The phone rings, it’s your dad
telling you you need
to pick up
the snowshoes
for your trip
and he’s making
white bean soup
with the ham hock
he’s been saving
in the freezer
for this moment
said he thought
he could throw it in
whole
but mum said no
no you need to cut it off the bone
and he sees now how right she is
sees now that it’s better this way
like the beans he soaked overnight
you still have to cook them he says
I say yes, I know, the soaking
only reduces the cooking time
but what I think he means is
separately, you still have to cook them
separately from the rest of the soup
which is another truth. Now,
it’s tomorrow and I’m thinking
I need to ask him how
the soup turned out.
By Lesa Hastings
Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.
We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.
“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.
Read More
By Johnny Cate
Featured Art: “Choreographic Translation,” black and white scan of choreographic
notation encapsulated in hand-made paper, by Zelda Thayer-Hansen
Post-punk November puts on
her black lipstick in the year’s mirror.
Eye shadow and zygomatic rouge
give time that Bauhaus cool: we’ve all
got it coming—who cares?
Death’s inevitability
means as much to me
as the bone-dry bottle of pinot noir
I drained solo under the blood moon—
gonna die and soon, soon.
So what? You won’t see me cry.
I’m deep six, baby—crystal-iris wastoid
in a white feather bed, voices in my head,
yeah, born doomed but it’s no
business of mine. I’m
drawing the blinds,
thinking about a girl in leather,
last name Jett slash first name Joan—
throw out your lame zodiac, loser,
and repeat after me: I don’t give a damn
’bout my bad reputation.
By Michael Derrick Hudson
At first it was sublime, all her medieval tapestry qualities,
her plangent, gracile profile against a field
of heraldic green, the silvery trill of her neighs. My life
has purpose now, so I told myself happily
shoveling fodder and greasing the tackle. An obligation
to myth and legend, so I told myself,
is worth the hassle. So I showered and shaved every day,
expelled vulgarity and embraced the necessity
for an orderly household. And yet she still craps the halls,
and crap is crap even when it shimmers like the rainbows
on an oil slick and smells an awful lot
like butterscotch candy. She’s moody! And an incurable
insomniac keeping me awake gobbling stardust and
moonbeams in the middle of the night, her dainty hooves
clip-clop-clip-clopping across the kitchen tiles.
She leaves the refrigerator door open half the time, uses up
the ice cubes. Every day it’s something, poking
her narwhal horn through the porch screen or another divot
gouged out of the drywall. Come the weekend,
she inevitably lays her head in the laps of my lady visitors,
pestering them to scratch her ears and
pat her dazzling pure white withers while she knocks over
beer cans and ashtrays. Some Knight Errant
or another is always pounding on the front door demanding
proof of her existence, as if I’m the Fairytale Ogre
keeping her locked away. Ha! She hides the whole time
in her bedroom like a teenager, ear pressed
against the door. Everything I say mortifies her. She plays
the same sad Joni Mitchell song over and over
on her little portable record player and mopes at suppertime
and smudges eyeliner all over the vanity. And each morning
she reproaches me over waffles with her doleful
little nickers, and I still have no idea how I got this so wrong.
By Baylina Pu
We were making mojitos
in the kitchen when we found
a mortar and pestle made of
Marble. With them, I crushed mint leaves
and later, slices of lime
four or five at a time. My friend
Mixed in sugar, the water
we’d carbonated ourselves, and
white rum with a wooden spoon
In a stainless-steel bowl.
That evening, the sun was
setting through the Japanese maple
By the porch, and leaves
had slid down the car windshield
like paper cut-outs. I felt
Grown up, a real woman. At dinner,
there were eleven of us crowded
around the table, beside
A glass door which looked out
over the lake, still unfrozen
even in November. We licked brown
Sugar off the rims of our glasses.
My hands could still feel the weight
of that marble mortar, an invention of
The Stone Age. Even as early
as then, happiness had already
been discovered: simple movements of
Grinding and stirring. Somewhere, desire
was calling, but we were so deep
in the woods nobody heard it.
By Johnny Cate
Featured Art: Still from “feed me stone fruits”, by Zelda Thayer Hansen, a collaborative performance with Isabella DeRose
She’s driving buzzed
but the PSAs call that drunk.
Soft swerve under a gibbous moon
ripe as a white bleb
ready to pop, subs banging
College Dropout. Baby blue
cardigan over a hot pink bra—
call it cotton candy Bubblicious,
messy pony strobing
in the passing streetlights.
Crimson lip’s been her thing
since something like eighth grade,
and in the dash-glow
it’s the deepest red imaginable,
catching the light as she raps
every word to every verse.
This is pretty girl privilege shit,
sweater riding up the small
of her back shit, black
and white rattlesnake boot shit.
If all beauty is truth and truth
beauty, her body’s sola
scriptura—spritzed with
“God is a Woman”, the latest
Ariana Grande eau de parfum.
The right tire grazes the rumble strip:
kiss of death but it’s a butterfly,
a literal vibe, and subtly
the whole car shudders, touched.
By Annie Schumacher
Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick
We drive six hours to a San Diego swimming pool.
A padded bikini top adorns a deer
trophy, buoys balance on the mantle.
Blue balloons, stuffed pheasants
in a fishing net. I place a gift bag
on a blue tablecloth. After rehab,
my brother smiles with ease,
skewering meat on the other side
of a screen door. Star spangled
diaper cake, blue M&Ms in a wide-
mouthed jar, gun safe in the bedroom.
Kitchen towels from Camp Pendleton.
Proud USMC Wife, Proud Mother,
Proud Unborn Baby, Proud Australian Shepherds.
My hair in the frosting,
my hair in the fishing net.
I follow the nameless dogs
through blue wrapping tissue,
decide on divorce with
a paper plate in my hand.
The baby, a murmur,
folded in his mother.
He will be named after a type of metal.
By Teresa Burns Gunther
“Echo-Delta,” his wife shouted from the dining room. “Can you order Chinese?”
Ed sighed and checked his watch. He’d given up begging Tanya not to speak this way. Tango, as she’d taken to calling herself, spoke in the NATO phonetic alphabet now: a side-effect of her new life mission, to change the medical-insurance-industrial complex one military letter at a time. Ed waited the last seconds until his office clock read 5:00 before leaning his hands into his desktop, where a client’s financial records were arrayed, and pushing himself up.
He grabbed his cane and made his slow way to the kitchen, wincing at the jolt of pain in his left leg, pain that poked a shaming finger. Since the pandemic, his accounting firm had allowed him to work from home, which was convenient given how the accident had left him.
Read MoreBy Clare Hickey
Clare Hickey: What was the moment you knew that Charles Darwin needed to be a part of this story? Were you familiar with him at all before?
Jodie Noel Vinson: Yeah, I love that you ask about the origins of this essay ’cause. I feel like it really became an exploration of origins. The essay really started with me in the early pandemic. Looking at, you know, this protester who was holding their sign sacrifice the week and kind of realizing I was one of the weak, maybe that they wanted to do away with and thinking, OK How did we get here? You know, and then kind of looking backwards and reflecting and Darwin’s story came into that. To kind of help me explore that question in my own life.
I really knew very little about Darwin’s life when I started the essay. He had been just this kind of iconic, almost stereotypical, even cartoonish, figure in my mind. And one thing I’ve learned in writing and researching, looking at the lives of of folks through the lens of illness, is that it kind of opens up kind of their humaneness and their vulnerabilities. It was really rewarding to learn about him in a more nuanced way. I think it was just really learning about the fact that someone who had studied and talked about and thought about survival of the fittest might himself be unfit. That kind of was the spark for the essay.
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Interview conducted by Cam Kurtz
Cam Kurtz: When was the first time that you were published as a poet?
Johnny Cate: Well, the first time I count was actually not that long ago. I believe it was like last year. It was kind of mid-summer last year. I had three picked up randomly before that, but I’d never read them to anybody, I would never perform them for anybody. It was a small press in Portland or something, but I don’t really count that. I think that was sort of like a fluke thing. So I count my official history of publication as beginning last summer basically. I think it was like last April that I got my first poem picked up.
I started to try [to get published] because I was coming to the end of my MFA, so I was like, okay, I’m going to start transitioning from the work of writing this book or this thesis, into the work of publishing. And that’s when I seriously started to find opportunities and push them out and really get going.
CK: What has it been like as your first year as a published poet?
Read MoreBy Clare Hickey
Clare Hickey: Congratulations on your essay “I Am No Beekeeper.” It’s been out for a little while now, but it just won Notable in Best American Essays. Has your relationship to the story changed at all since writing it or publishing it?
Arya Samuelson: Yes, definitely! I just read the essay a few weeks ago as part of a performance piece, so it’s fascinating to kind of relive that story all over again – especially with the recent Best American Essays nod. One of the really beautiful things about having this story in the world has been hearing people’s responses. Many people have shared about their own abortion experiences, some of which shared deep parallels to mine and some of which were completely different, but all of which carried a similar kind of lingering potency, especially because we had been carrying these stories in secret.
Since publication, I’ve had the pleasure of being invited into many reading and collaboration spaces centered around subversive motherhood. It’s been so powerful to witness such a spectrum of experiences surrounding the complexities of motherhood and to deliberately bring abortion into that conversation.
I wrote the essay while I was at the artist residency and living out the experience in real time, so there’s a lot that has changed for me since writing it. I’m actually working on a sequel right now that
is all about rocks and rage and ritual. The essay takes on the question of how to memorialize my abortion, as in, how to create a “remembering space” out of it. The story picks up exactly a year after the abortion and explores how I’ve struggled & experimented with how to commemorate something that I absolutely don’t regret. Rocks – and their infinite view on history – have been a big ally to me through this process. Through sharing this essay out in the world, I’ve also learned how many people have created their own abortion rituals, and how all of us are doing this in the dark, without knowing how un-alone we are.
CH: What was it like to read your own work for an audience?
AS: I actually love reading work out loud! I was originally trained as a singer, so music is a huge part of my approach to language and how I think about phrasing and how I want it to feel and resonate. I think there’s so much power in getting to feel how something lands in a room… I often feel more satisfied reading a piece of work out loud for an audience than publishing it.
CH: I read it again right before our call and it almost struck me as a coming of age story. You come to a lot of realizations about yourself and other people during the story and the way the past impacts your future. Did you feel like it was a coming of age story at all?
AS: I don’t know if I would have called it that, but what I can say is that the experience was deeply transformative in ways that I’m still reckoning with. While I was writing the first draft of the essay, I was just starting out at the residency, where there was mold everywhere, and I was so sad and lonely. It was excruciating, and at the same time, it was ecstatic. I was in such a broken-open place that I was flooded with language everywhere I went. It was so intense and exhausting and yet also life-affirming. I don’t wish I could relive that month, but there’s something I miss about that kind of intensity. I knew that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. One of the greatest gifts that the abortion gave me – and writing this story – was a greater ability to hold paradox: to hold the life inside of death, to hold the grief of a choice without regret, and the light that is always somehow available in darkness.
CH: Could I ask you about your process?
AS: It started the way that it happened in the essay, with the housemate begging me to collaborate. When I went back to my room, I just tried to dredge up anything I could about bees. I did some research and some freewriting, but it seemed like a dead end. Still, something about the idea of bees and abortion lingered with me. Bees represent fertility, and abortion is, well, the opposite, so there was a kind of friction between these two ideas – or a buzz! – that felt compelling to me. So I knew there was something to this idea, but I still wasn’t sure what it was. Then I started researching more about bees and discovering how they’ve always been associated, not just with fertility, but also with death and grieving and rebirth. Meanwhile, I kept writing about all the grief that was alive for me at the time – the broken engagement, the death of a relationship that was never going to work, the dying leaves all around me – and then cobbled together the first, barely-strung together draft.
The first draft of the essay wasn’t set at the artist residency. It was basically a lot of different ideas that were placed next to each other, without any scenes to orient or ground the reader. My readers suggested that maybe the story could be set at the residency and played out over the course of the month I was living there. I was initially a bit reluctant about this idea, because I thought that hearing about life at an artist residency might not relate for a reader and might come off like a rarified, insular experience. But I tried it out, and it instantly delivered a new kind of warmth to the story – more glow and humor and tenderness. I found that I loved bringing these women to life and this place that we all lived in together. In retrospect, I don’t know how else this story could have been told. It became a tribute to them.
CH: You touched on it briefly with writing about the other women in the residency. How do you find the experience of writing about other people?
AS: This is one of the biggest questions that nonfiction writers get asked and have to contend with. I have many thoughts about it! In terms of this piece, I didn’t particularly struggle with writing about my mom or my exes. I think that’s because I was writing more about the grief and pain and love that I associated with them, rather than writing about any anger I carried towards them. That would have been a lot harder.
What did surprise me was how scared I was to send the published essay to the women at the residency, because I worried they might feel a little invaded by being included. They knew I was working on something about abortion while I was there, but I don’t think they expected to be part of it. Thankfully, they’ve actually been quite gracious about it, and the nocturnal bee painter has shared it with basically everyone she knows! I’m grateful that these women are still part of my life.
CH: There’s a lot of beautiful vulnerability in this essay. You’ll also write fiction. How do you find the differences in vulnerability between the two genres?
AS: To me, the challenge of nonfiction is to find the story. We are working with so much raw material – every association and memory of our lives – but from there, we have to figure out what is and isn’t important and carve out the particular story that we’re trying to tell. This can take a very long time.
With nonfiction, I love how I always get to discover new things. Nonfiction gives me a chance to take all the things I thought were true – about myself, about my life, about what I’ve been through – and to dig deeper and deeper until I’ve come to totally understand them anew. To me, that’s the ultimate pleasure, that discovery and surprise. That’s what keeps me coming back to writing.
When I’m writing nonfiction, I feel myself changing as the story evolves. The process requires turning the subconscious conscious and I find this glorious. But fiction lives on a more subconscious level. I have a novel that I’ve been working on for 5+ years, and I’m still constantly discovering, for example, that a character reminds me of my father or my childhood best friend. It’s like, Really? It took me 5 years to realize that? There is something so mysterious about fiction that is both magical and maddening.
CH: Did you feel more catharsis in writing the essay, or in the response you’ve gotten with shared experiences about abortion?
AS: Writing this essay during the residency felt like a lifeline. It was wild to feel simultaneously so broken and consumed with creativity. I don’t believe that the tortured artist trope is at all what we should be aspiring to – I believe in art coming from a place that can sustain joy and be made in a way that supports all of our other endeavors – but this just happened to be the way everything went down. Writing this essay at that particular moment connected me to a larger sense of possibility when so many doors had just closed. It kept me tethered to hope, which is why I say that, to me, art is almost religious. Hearing about how people have connected with the essay has also been deeply impactful– not out of a need for anyone’s approval, but because it’s life-affirming to feel connected through our most intimate truths.
CH: In the act of writing it did you know it would become that lifeline for you or was that a surprising accomplishment?
AS: I knew it would become something. My greatest maturing as a writer over the last ten years has been trusting myself more and more. I trust my process. I trust that the story always comes in time. I trust when there’s something that I think is connected, it is connected, and it’ll probably take me years to figure out how to connect the dots for anybody else, but I trust that I’m onto something.”
Clare Hickey is a NOR intern studying English Literature and Writing at Ohio University.
Interview conducted by Shelbie Music
Shelbie Music: How did you get into writing? What did that journey look like for you?
Noah Pohl: So I started writing in middle school, it was kind of a creative outlet for me. I was always a big reader growing up and if I had an opportunity to use creativity in something, I would try to do that. I had some really encouraging teachers who helped kind of nurture that. It’s funny ’cause I originally was more into screenwriting than I was into fiction. And when I was growing up, I would buy published screenplays off Amazon and I would just read them and study them. And I later pivoted into fiction. It’s been a long journey, but I like the fact that I can kind of bounce between the two mediums.
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By Jenna Brown
Amid a climate crisis—hurricane after hurricane in the Gulf Coast, flooding in the Sahara Desert, and bleaching coral reefs—Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples attempts to redefine our interconnectedness with the Earth in its intimate writing style.
Published in late-2024, Core Samples follows Henderson’s experience as she balances motherhood, writing, work as a climate scientist, and her time as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Weaving together scientific findings, stories of misogyny in the science field, and anecdotes of foibles in governmental systems, Henderson creates a captivating memoir that screams at the top of its lungs, “carpe diem” (but also “fuck carpe diem”).
Henderson begins her narrative with a notebook, the “first tool” she obtained as a scientist. “While some people see art and science as opposites,” she writes, “for me, they are a braided river, each strand and flow an approach to wonder.” Climate change primarily has not been a main political concern, her writing implies, because of the inaccessibility of climate science literature (i.e. scholarly publications, journals, and studies). Through memoir, Henderson makes the climate crisis approachable, framing our interaction with the Earth’s systems as a relationship, an ongoing story.
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By Kate Fox
In a 1967 interview with Time magazine, Elizabeth Bishop said of the Confessional Poets, who were her contemporaries, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.” Having secrets of her own, she kept her own poems cool and distant, cerebral and succinct. What is interesting, though, is that she didn’t use the term “confessional” to describe these poets. Instead, she referred to the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, her close friend Robert Lowell, and others as the “School of Anguish.” After reading Ron Mohring’s The Boy Who Reads in the Trees, I would place these poems firmly in that category.
“Confessional” implies that someone needs to confess—that they’ve done something wrong or shameful. Bishop seems to have sensed that the term was all wrong. These poets weren’t confessing things they’d done; they were in anguish about things that had been done to them: Bullying. Neglect. Homophobia. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—and the depression, alcoholism, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other mental maladies that might naturally result from such treatment.
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By Tessa Carman
A good guide welcomes her charges into a new building, book, or idea, and prepares them for encounter, perhaps struggle, and for unexpected delight. She pulls open doors previously locked, unveils portraits, and leads the group up balustrades, through vaults, and up turret stairs, peering into transoms, calling attention to cornices and corbels and rayonets. But she never gets in the way of the encounter; she arranges, interprets, but ultimately steps aside so that they can see for themselves.
A good teacher is a guide, who has also been the seeker, the asker of questions, and remains so, even as she becomes someone who inspires others to see, to seek and question, and then to make their own songs, sculptures, portraits, craft.
Betsy Brown is that kind of docent, and her debut poetry collection, City Nave, is structured like a cathedral, comprising four sections: “Stairs” leads us to the “Narthex,” a sort of waiting room before entering the sanctuary, the “Nave,” at the center, within which we find the “Altar.”
I love showing Betsy Brown’s poems to my students. There’s a quality to the poetry that makes it an especial joy to share her with young people on the cusp of adulthood. Hers is a wise and winsome voice that has that golden quality of a good teacher. She respects the intelligence of her students, her audience. And she passes on the fruits of her own keen attention, inviting them in to see better—sometimes by asking them with her lively language to stand on their heads while they look.
Read MoreBy Jodie Noel Vinson
Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—Port St. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction
(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)
Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much
(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)
Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”
At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”
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Issue 34 issue tackles themes ranging from grief to adoption to parenting to queer love, and it features the NORward Prize-winning poem “Reading Shackleton During My Husband’s Cancer Treatment” by Michele Bombardier.
In this issue, there is new poetry from Sara Baker, John Bargowski, Eben E. B. Bein, A. J. Bermudez, Megan Blankenship, Billy Collins, Robert Cording, Rob Cording, Steve Coughlin, Sara Fetherolf, Charlene Fix, George Franklin, Mary Jo Firth Gillett, Ockert Greef, August Green, Ted Kooser, Veronica Kornberg, Mark Kraushaar, Becca J. R. Lachman, Michael Mark, Maria Martin, Jen McClanaghan, Patricia Colleen Murphy, Meryl Natchez, David O’Connell, Dion O’Reilly, Lea Page, Seth Peterson, Michael Pontacoloni, Jessy Randall, Stephanie Staab, Alan Shapiro, Kenneth Tanemura, Chrys Tobey, Jaya Tripathi, and Rose Zinnia.
Included in Issue 34 are essays written by Jess Richardson and Sunni Brown Wilkinson and stories by Adrienne Brock, V. F. Cordova, Shaun Haurin, Bruce McKay, Alan Sincic, Allegra Solomon, and Eliza Sullivan.
The Features in this issue include reviews of Carrie Oeding’s If I Could Give You a Line, Abigail Rose-Marie’s The Moonflowers, Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language, , E. M. Tran’s Daughters of the New Year, John Gallaher’s My Life in Brutalist Architecture, Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming, and Zoë Bossiere’s Cactus Country from Claire Bateman, Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal, Denise Duhamel, Gwen E. Kirby, Kevin Prufer, Erin Redfern, and Nicole Walker.
We hope you enjoy Issue 34, which you can order by visiting our online marketplace.
Thanks for reading,
-The Editors
By Jessy Randall
We were talking about words
we didn’t like. One of us
was making a list, and we all
wanted our words on it.
“Leverage” came up, and the
overuse of “awesome.”
(We were distracting ourselves
from the reason we were together—
or not distracting, exactly, but
giving ourselves a breather
from grieving and thinking about loss.
We were in town for a funeral.)
My turn came and I didn’t
want to say, didn’t want my mouth
to make the word, but I screwed up
my courage and said it: “meatball.”
The others laughed, not at my word, I think,
but at the face I made when I said it.
The conversation turned to social justice,
but “meatball” had been said aloud
and it imbued the rest of the visit,
for me, with ridiculousness, and maybe,
much as I hate “meatball”—my god—
with hope.
By Charlene Fix
I don’t remember her name.
It was Adrienne.
She lived with her parents
in an apartment on Cedar,
the road that split school districts.
So when she threw a party,
she invited kids from both.
Feeling shy in her crowded
living room, I sat on Mark
Shore’s lap while he sat on
the lap of a comfy chair.
We laughed and laughed,
my giddiness netting me
two new boyfriends I didn’t
want or seek and whose interest
waned anyway as soon as they
found I was fun only when
perched on Mark Shore’s lap.
I loved abstractly then, all in
my head, divorced romantically
from anyone real. Mark and I
were just friends, with all of
just’s implications. So we remain,
though he passed away a while ago.
That night I felt protected on his lap
where I could gaze upon the social sea
secure, even when he worked
his arm up the back of my blouse,
until his hand emerged at my collar
waving to those in the room
and, in this ebb-time, to you.
By Michael Mark
In the photograph that my father has
me take of him with the woolly mammoth,
he’s pointing to himself. He asks
to see the selfie. I don’t correct
his terminology. Next, the triceratops, then
the sabertooth tiger. He takes the same stance
throughout the Extinction Exhibit. With the 4000-
year-old beetle, 300-million-year-old coelacanth,
the dodo. She was beautiful,
he sighs at the butterfly, and I get the sense
he’s thinking about Mom. Earlier, in his kitchen,
he posed with a jar of mayonnaise
with the expiration date from 1998, also pointing
to himself. At the cemetery, he stands on his plot,
next to my mother, because I refuse to let him
lie down. Back at his apartment, he says it’s nice
to have some company. I know
he’s referring to his defunct card game, so we go
down to the game room. He sits at their once
regular table and points around the empty chairs,
Billy, Dick, Harold, Nat, Frank, hey Joe. He deals
them in. I take the picture of him squinting at the cards, fanned
tight to his chest. He tosses a chip to the center
of the felt. In the shot, it really looks like
he’s waiting for someone to call his bet.
By Mark Kraushaar
With the thumb and first finger make an L.
L is for loser.
It’s a thing anymore.
Now think of 8th grade.
There was King of Detention Jimmy Ramish.
There was Too Tall Eunice Bugg, plus
Kitchen Tom plus Clyde Skopina
who’d said his father was an astronaut—
he was lying and Brenda
Kleefish let him know we knew it too.
Glide, she’d called him, meanly,
Glide away, she’d say and wave.
There was dummy Aldo Krull
and there was fatso Mitchell Beacham,
Beachball, he was called, of course.
And Annie Friebert?
Annie’s winter colds
were worst and left a criss-crossed
slug trail up her parka sleeve.
Achoo we’d say, achoo, achoo.
Hey Annie drop your hankie?
Ha, ha, ha, ha-choo.
She was a neighbor and our folks were friends.
But with Clyde Skopina came a certain desperation,
nothing anyone could name, leastwise not me—
it’s just I wish I’d looked out a little for him.
In the lunch line once, believing we
were friends, touching my arm,
and smiling hard to trick the facts,
he said, My dad can lift a car.
By Mark Kraushaar
I’m watching the pinball
champ of Wisconsin: super flipper work,
perfect balance, both arms fully extended
excepting a slight bend at the elbows.
He’s playing Pop-A-Card, and Highway Patrol
and when he stops for a bite of his fries
I think, Yes, eating must be different for him
but I mostly mean different for the famous in general
and not only eating but reading, breathing, seeing, swimming, etc.,
because, and I’m guessing now, enhanced or diminished,
filtered, shaped or inflated, for there must be
something not the same.
I think, Immortality experienced from within
must be . . . must seem . . . must . . . or just . . . what is it exactly?
Plus he looks so totally focused
(which at the Barneveld Bowl-A-Drome
on league night with the TVs and the glitter
and glare, the clinking drinks and crashing pins
is no mean trick) but when his last ball bounces
off the lower left bumper and dives
straight down the gobble hole which is,
ask anyone, like a tiny dose of death
and he doesn’t get a bonus ball or free game
or even a match he looks just the way you or I might
suddenly look: sullen and shaken,
and then, pausing and perplexed he says,
he says because I’m watching and I hear
how softly his words reflect
a particular reticence,
Magnets man, magnets.
By Seth Peterson
it happened fast. Suddenly, everyone had Rubik’s cubes
& Game Boys.
All day, their eyes & hands were busy, waving sepia Polaroids,
lining up kaleidoscopes.
They felt an easing in their hearts, a silence they couldn’t place.
At night, they noticed these things
could still glow, these new old things, humming in their own way.
Humming
the way a mother hums to her child. A wrecking ball revived these things.
A confederate statue
had its head hacked off at midnight. No one could find it, & for months
it stood there, headless,
haunting all their dreams, until everyone agreed to tear it down.
Beneath the concrete
horse hooves, the elaborate part of the monument, was a hollow-slotted base.
There were murmurs
as the steel crashed into it. They remembered the capsule at its heart.
They remembered
what it was to be a child again. They remembered piñatas & birthdays.
The clap of steel
on concrete sent out a splash of color. A Cabbage Patch Kid.
A Walkman.
A pair of hot pink leg warmers. Each one humming like a memory.
The point is,
these were things they wanted to remember. & it happened
everywhere,
all across the country, all at once. & their hearts were eased.
Some boys, soon after,
claimed to have found the statue’s head. It was covered by wintercreeper
in the woods, they claimed.
It was haphazardly spattered with peat moss. The rumor is,
it’s still there,
absorbing knives of moonlight. They say its mask is ghastly.
It is ghastly.
You think it’s gone, but things can change.
By David O’Connell
Some believe the new math
proves reality is actually
a hologram. And who am I
to argue when I don’t know
the language? I speak pig math.
At times, finger count. Failed
this week to help my daughter
with her fractions. Don’t worry,
you’ll never use it in real life,
remember? But now it seems
this math has always been
presiding over smoke-filled
back rooms of the universe,
invisible mover and shaker
knowing what we want
are answers, and that we want
them now. Outside, the street
is darker for the light rain,
and I’ve cracked the window
to catch the scent of earth
kicked up by water falling
back to us. Nothing is lost,
explained the talking head
last night, asking that we picture
clapped erasers raising
clouds of dust. The math
he detailed says it’s possible
for every molecule of chalk
I smacked out in angry
plumes beside St. Mary’s
one afternoon in 1982
to reverse and gather again
upon the board—faint, then
clearly remaking each mistake
I’d scrawled that day in class.
Implausible, but not. An act
the nuns would’ve taught us
wasn’t math but miracle
on par with the angels
that appeared—like, what?
if not holograms—to trumpet
what they knew was right.
By David O’Connell
You must act as though you’ll live,
though you will not live
and can imagine when you’re gone
the few stories that will be told
about your life, each a bright thread
that, in time, will fade
until all that’s said about your life
is genealogy, your name
or only your initials
beside those of the ones you love
and call by name
and struggle to understand.
It is for them that you must trust
when there is so little to win your trust
that it matters. Not just this rain
you feel falling
but knowing it’s fallen before
far from here under this same sun.
By Adrienne Brock
Featured Art: “Autumn Window” by Scott Brooks (Passion Works Studio)
Before her father died, Amanda’s daughter used to crawl up onto the big bed and draw dramatic imaginative landscapes with her mother: tiny-shaped figures escaping from aliens using elaborately constructed slides or hot-air balloons. Immediately after the day of his funeral, they had tried to continue the tradition, but rather than adding onto each other’s fantastical scenarios, these two could only manage coloring bland shapes, inert and unanimated. Síomha had never been cuddly, not even as a baby, but in the middle of filling in a green rectangle with bright purple marker, the seven-year-old had pulled her mother’s arm around her and clung to it until her breathing slowed in sleep. Puffed breaths passed through the girl’s lips as if the child had summoned her father’s spirit to hold him in place on the Earth.
Before, Amanda had noted, warmly if resentfully, the uncanniness of her daughter’s unconscious impressions of her husband. She was ambivalent, taking a kind of painful joy in all of the ways in which Síomha literally embodied her father. But when they were out together, she felt the urge to scream to passersby, “I swear she’s my kid!” Or watching father and daughter play effortlessly, their humors and interests almost identical, Amanda felt as if she were watching her friend win a promotion for a job she’d wanted herself. On bad days, there had been a feeling that father and daughter were aligned against her. Now, it was immediately apparent that this feeling had been not only a result of her own stupid, stubborn inability to feel really at home, but it had also been a waste of time. A missed opportunity. Instead of vaguely threatening, these little ways in which Síomha resembled her father transmuted for a while into the only animate containers of his presence. His things remained in the house but were inert. His coffeemaker never needed to be cleaned anymore. A book was left on the bedside table, but the bookmark didn’t move, nor did the book travel around the house as it would have before, finding itself deposited in random locations on a sightseeing tour of their rooms, its owner calling out for the location of the lost tourist. At the side of their bed, her husband’s clothes hung suspended from wire hangers in the wardrobe. When someone walked quickly from room to room, the clothes would move slightly, and glancing in from the corridor, Amanda would have an illogical glimpse into what might have been: her husband had just taken something out of the wardrobe. He must be getting dressed. They were on their way somewhere together, and she would go so far as to open her mouth to speak, to ask what time it was, if he had rung the sitter. For weeks following the funeral, Tom’s phone would buzz with reminders about upcoming bills, and Amanda would feel the absence of a hand that might have reached for it, the absence of the sound of him upstairs, the absence when she returned home after work of smells from the kitchen from some experiment that would have become dinner.
Read MoreBy Billy Collins
They say a child might grow up to be an artist
if his sandcastle means nothing
until he brings his mother over for a look.
I’m that way with my wife.
Little things that happen don’t mean much
until I report back from the front.
I ran into Rick from the gift shop.
The post office flag is at half-mast.
I counted the cars on a freight train.
Who else in the world would put up
with such froth before it dissolves in the surf?
But early this morning
while I was alone in the pool,
a Vatican-red cardinal flashed down
from the big magnolia
and landed on the deck
right next to where I was standing in the water.
Here was an event worth mentioning,
but I decided that I would keep this one to myself.
I alone would harbor and possess it.
Then I went back to watching the bird
pecking now at the edge of the garden
with the usual swivel-headed wariness of a bird.
I was an unobserved observer
of this private moment,
with only my head above the water,
at very close range for man and bird,
considering my large head and lack of feathers.
A sudden rustling in the magnolia
revealed the vigilant gray-and-pink female,
the mate with whom he shared his life,
but I wouldn’t share this with my wife,
not in the kitchen or in bed,
nor would I disclose it as she made toast
or worked the Sunday crossword.
Indeed, I would take the two cardinals to my grave.
It was just then that she appeared
in a billowing yellow nightgown
carrying two steaming cups of coffee,
and before she could hand one to me,
of course, I began to tell her all about the cardinals,
he pecking in the garden,
she flitting from branch to branch in the tree,
as if we were the male and female birds,
she with the coffee and me in the pool,
leaving me to make sure I divulged
every aspect of the experience,
including the foolish part
about my plan to keep it all a secret,
and that really dumb thing about the grave.
By Billy Collins
Many of us poets have been asked
to go someplace, often somewhere
we have never been, nor would ever think
to go, to read our poems out loud.
Audiences gather in these places
to hear us read our poems out loud
and to see what we are wearing,
which is often part of the disappointment.
Someone said that professors get paid
to read, but poets get paid to read out loud.
Julian Barnes said: they don’t come
to hear you read your work.
They want to know what you had for breakfast.
I think it’s a little of both,
as in Galway Kinnell’s poem called “Oatmeal,”
which is both beautiful and informative
regarding what the poet likes for breakfast.
It’s about having breakfast with John Keats
and he must have read that poem out loud
many times and in many places
where he had never been before
because we have only a handful of good poems,
so we read the same ones time after time,
if only to please the crowd,
and the poems come and go,
repeating like the painted animals
on a carousel, only without the up-and-down music.
And the audiences watch them go by,
the oatmeal poem coming around again
and one about a man in a hammock,
and a poem with an uncle in a single-engine plane.
And here’s the white horse again
with the orange plume and the wooden teeth,
as all the decorative little mirrors make their rounds.
By Robert Cording
After my son died in October, I lived
with Keats’ Autumn in my head—
not the relish of lingering summer warmth
in mid-fall, but his one-line imperative:
Think not of the songs of spring.
I watched summer’s hummingbirds
fly off, then the gold of finches turn
dull green. But I couldn’t live with
the music of fall. I heard only those
first words—think not—which I did very well.
How much more Keats had demanded
of himself. And how many more falls I had
yet to undergo before I could hear,
just outside my door, hedge crickets sing.
By Rob Cording
A year after my brother died,
I told my daughter about
the toad that once lived
in the hollowed-out knot
of an apple tree
in the center of my childhood
driveway. My brothers and I
liked to visit it after school,
but the tree came down
in a snowstorm, and my parents
graveled-over that spot.
When my daughter
asked what happened
to the toad, I explained that
it probably moved
under a rock, or to the woodpile
along the side of the house. “Or,”
she responded, “it died.”
Then, she skipped into the house
and left me outside.
By Jaya Tripathi
this cheery fever feels
like a temporary insanity I was safer
in the country of control doling out small pleasures
to myself like a wily jailer like a loosie peddler
like a guppy’s sphincter this morning
I washed tiny newborn bloomers there were no fates
scuttling in the washing machine no sheep livers
on the drying rack later in the shower when I felt her
moving like a bag of cats between my hip bone
and my heart I painted a cobweb of Silly String
around my fat belly cupped my veiny breasts
and crowed not long ago I grew my certainty
fresh every day like a liver asked the doctors to look deep
at the pieces of my child sparkling in my blood
her stars her tattoo I hummed a boy scout
is always prepared my daughter heard me
through my navel and laughed lying
slathered in aspic I clutched at every skeletal preview
each glimpse of augury fading too fast
a stick of incense on a dark stair I always wanted
to be a mother but I thought I’d be
an armory a phalanx her stillsuit
in a gray shitty world instead
I see her hiccup on a monitor
and I break open into sunshine
completely
By Mary Jo Firth Gillet
Before the suck and stutter of the first breath, even
before the first cells hook up for an amniotic float in
if not primordial bliss then something just this side of it,
there was the want, the desire that begat the pre-child
then stuck in a world impossible to remember, impossible
not to feel sorrow mixed with joy over my newborn’s
eviction from her Eden, her tenderest of faultless flesh
now to know the endless hunger, the deep cold of alone,
the body a riot of wants, wants unto the last gasp
of my mother’s four-foot-nine-inch fierce frame, every inch
railing railing against the bait-and-switch trickster’s scythe,
her only wish the hunger for more days, more life, and so
someone from hospice calls me to come get this inconvenient,
angry woman who will not go gentle into that good night.
By Dion O’Reilly
Suzie, I want to tell you
how frequently I pass the apartment
behind the supermarket
where we street-danced
to the Doobie Brothers,
light shifting as the fog
lifted, front-yard roses
iridescent in the salt-gray
seaside morning.
You died, what, ten years ago?
Not at once, really, though pills
took you quickly. It began, I think,
when we were children: without
knowing why, we wanted out
of that rural beauty—the narrow
valley and gleaming stream,
summers spent diving off
crumbling cliffs, as if nearness
to death was the closest
we came to leaving
your stepdad’s beery fingers,
my Mother who loved
to touch the sweaty chests
of her daughters’ teenage lovers.
Nowadays, everything
is a different kind of dangerous:
rain stays away. June mist
sucks away too soon,
sunlight breaks through
before it should.
What I want to say, Suzie,
is a moment, gone
fifty years, is just a moment,
but you’re still here, unfleshed
in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan—
our arms looped as we turn
tight circles, round and round,
your eyes locked on mine.
By George Franklin
My mother used to say that only old people read them.
Now, I get an email about a classmate from high school,
Someone I might not have recognized over fifty years ago,
Much less today. I could call my friend Richard to ask,
Who was the guy who just died? And, Richard could tell me.
But the truth is that I don’t want to keep track of acquaintances
Beneath the ground—or above it. The cemetery in Shreveport
Was just down the block from a drive-thru liquor store that
Didn’t ask for IDs. The ability to turn the steering wheel and
Press the gas pedal was apparently good enough. On the same
Street, a fried chicken place sold onions pickled in jalapeños
And vinegar. They went down well with Jack Daniel’s
On summer weekends when we’d play penny-ante poker
In someone’s garage. Back then, almost none of us were dying.
By Meryl Natchez
A week past the twenty-ninth anniversary of your death
I read Seamus Heaney’s poem about the kite,
and my first thought is to show it to you.
So I stumble again
into the hole death leaves,
unfillable.
Another morning
of a day that promises
to be beautiful
without your presence
except for this faint ache
because you loved kites,
their unpredictable dialogue
with the wind
transmitted to your hand.
That hand gone
and gone again
each time
I reach for it.
By Allegra Solomon
The young couple was leaving the theater and walking to a nearby bar. Behind them, the marquee read: Eyes Wide Shut—One Night Only. They’d gone with some of their friends and co-workers from the library. It was an independent theater with only two show rooms, and the couple frequented it to the point of the cashiers and ushers knowing their names. On the theater’s Instagram, they noted that every Friday in February they would play a different romance film in the spirit of Valentine’s Day. The Friday before was a special triple feature of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. The Friday before that, Love & Basketball, and the Friday before that, In The Mood for Love. Why they chose to end on Eyes Wide Shut, the man couldn’t understand. He said this as he threw out the woman’s empty Sprite cup. She’d hardly noticed it left her hand.
It’s so funny, the woman said. Seeing them get all riled up like that. Cruise and Kidman. And they were married at the time. You think they ever argued like that?
God, no, the man said. Never. Either never, or all the time.
Read MoreBy Chrys Tobey
Maybe he wanted to ask about our cats
and dog. Maybe he was curious about how many
colleges I now teach for, curious about my job prospects
as a poet in a pandemic. I didn’t send him a message—
didn’t tell him I saw you on the beach this summer
walking with your new partner, didn’t tell him how
you looked somewhat happy, how I felt excited for you—
I almost ran up to say hi, but I was in my bathing suit
and it was our anniversary, or what would have been
our anniversary, anyway. Maybe I should write
your dad, I’m okay. I don’t know if he would care that our
old man cat is dying, that I give him IV fluids, or that I finally fell
in love with someone, but she broke like the coffee
cup I once threw on the kitchen floor in front of you.
Perhaps he’d like to know that I had a biopsy in my vagina
and even though I felt like a plank of wood was on my chest
with someone standing on it while I waited for the results,
it came back fine. I could share how some days
I feel this sadness that can make it difficult
to bake a potato or how, once, I almost burned your ear
with a wax candle or how I still think about the time
you gave me a bag of socks with grips on the bottom
because I kept falling down our bedroom stairs.
You were so afraid I’d break my leg or hit my head
or worse, especially after I bruised my butt purple,
but love, I knew then what I’d tell your dad now—I’ll be all right.
By Chrys Tobey
with two new creases in my forehead. Deep creases.
The night before, my hair stylist tells me
she wants to get some lift because a man
once told her she would not have to worry
about lines. Just gravity. So I think about the
dermatologist who said Now you look so young after he
convinced me to treat some scars when I was twenty-four,
when I looked fourteen. I fall asleep reading a poem by a woman
who mourns her youth and another elegy nostalgic for beauty
someone fears she’s lost. My girlfriend hates her lines. Hates
her freckles. She asks me to dye the gray from her hair before
she confesses she got Botox before our first date. I eat dinner
with a friend in his early forties; as he sips some whiskey, I remind
him he’s attractive and he smirks, That ship has sailed.
Another friend is going through a divorce
and she’s afraid no one will want to date her.
Later, I google the poet who feels men don’t want
her anymore because she’s no longer young.
She’s gorgeous. During my birthday weekend,
I sheepishly share some photos from my twenties. I see a sad
young woman struggling to smile perfectly
for the disposable camera. If that’s the ship,
let it float away. I’ll blow it kisses while I walk
to the coffee shop. I’ll blow my beautiful friends kisses. I’ll
blow the lamenting poets kisses. And here is a kiss
for our poor brains. And this kiss is for my heart
when the barista smiles and says, It’s on me.
By Patricia Colleen Murphy
I’m one five-euro monastery away
from skipping our port tour on the Douro
to bury my head in a novel. It’s the point
of the trip where Do you need a tissue?
means Blow your goddamn nose!
and no one’s had a decent BM since PHL.
The weather is so 13th century. We’re
on vacation. Would it kill you to kiss me?
I think of the monks in the cloister
dusting the coat-of-arms.
If I’m going to make you fall in love again
should I start by telling you that I came from
a difficult family, that I once dated
an All-Star from the Cincinnati Reds?
By now we’re seventeen years in. I’ll wear
a dress and you’ll wear a tie. I’ll lie
close to you, even when you’re asleep,
because I love so much to soft-tickle your skin.
I think of the monks in the chapter house
still as baroque statues. The monks in the refectory
whose black robe-sleeves dip into their mushy salt cod.
They who spend night after night in rows.
By Stephanie Staab
I hate you now, of course, but still there are times when I’m hungry
for a certain kind of calm.
Coffee didn’t keep you awake, gin didn’t get you drunk.
You were watertight against bodily concerns, especially love.
I’ll fall in love with the bank clerk if she sorts the bills in a pleasing way.
A bus driver, if he asks why I’m always on the 6:16.
I’m all hearts, no other organs. My heart purifies toxins from a glass of champagne.
My heart sheds its lining once a month. It searches strangers’ faces in a crowd.
So, if we meet again that way, in a throng
there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.
It’s yellow. It creeps.
I have a hair in my mouth when I try to say it.
I want to know what greeting you would choose for a chance
encounter on the street in a random city. What sign of peace.
I would stand ill-mannered while you decide
no tilt forward, no arm outstretched, no demure offering of a cheek.
A nod? A handshake? Perhaps you’d place a hand over your heart and bow.
This, the tenderest in the lexicon of human gestures.
What I really want to know is this:
What is in your pockets now?
Who cuts your hair?
By Ockert Greef
The boy is sitting backward on a cheap plastic chair
His shoulders bowed under a faded orange towel
Behind him stands a shirtless man
His belly drooping over bright blue running shorts
They are on a roofless cement stoop
At the back of a small, dull house
With one window and one door
A large tree leans over them
Letting the sun through to draw yellow lines
Across the stoop, the boy and the man
In front of the boy on the cement is a radio
And behind it, a big engine on a rusty metal stand
The big-bellied man lays his index finger
On the crown of the boy’s head
Bending it forward and down
With a thick hand he moves a pair of clippers up
Against the back of the boy’s head
Hair falling on the faded orange towel
He moves the clippers slowly
Up and down
Flicking the clippers every now and then
To send small flocks of hair flying
Now he stops
Tilts his head
Stares past the boy in the direction of the radio
He stands just like that, frozen
Speckles of dust circling his index finger
On the boy’s bowed head
A lost piece of hair drifting down
The boy’s eyes are closed
His face so relaxed, he could be sleeping
And behind him, the big-bellied man’s eyes close
Just for a moment
And then open.
By Eben E. B. Bein
for 天野
I am sitting on a lozenge-shaped couch
in the waiting area of a Cartier,
wrinkling my nose at the etched perfume
and the fake-looking straight couple
on the #CartierStoriesByYou poster,
sending you snaps of the Panthère collection
with hammy voiceovers and there is no reason I,
who have never and will never again enter a Cartier,
should be so completely myself except I know
you will say yes.
And being so sure makes me
nervous since you bought the band yourself
years ago, convinced you would never meet someone,
and just this morning handed it to me:
Engrave something. Nine characters or less.
Surprise me. And to make matters worse, I,
who have vacillated for decades on a word,
knew instantly what it would be.
Yes. You’ve got me
so diamond clear, so fit to burst, so chest
full of yes compressions that when the sales associate
messes up your pronouns a third time
I just give a watery thanks and duck out
onto the street where actual people are,
and two of them, maybe a couple,
are laughing, like, with their actual bellies
at what must have been a stupid joke
and I didn’t hear a word of it but
now I’m laughing as well as crying,
so completely at yes with myself,
walking home so fast I’m almost running
because I can’t wait to tell you about it.
By Lea Page
Featured art: “Jungle Gathering” by Fred Cremeans, Tiffany Grubb, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)
No such thing
as an unseasonable storm
here on the high plains,
but winds were horrific,
temperatures plummeting.
A rescue call went out—
migrating waterfowl,
sheltering on a local pond,
were trapped in ice—
not literally frozen in place
but without enough open water,
they couldn’t take off.
People flocked to the rescue,
chopped open a path,
then leaned on their axes and mauls
to watch the birds go.
That shrinking window,
our collective responsibility,
but for this one moment,
let us be heroes.
By Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Petrified wood is a lesson in belief, not so much a belief in what you see but in what you feel. Touching it, rubbing your fingers over its impossibly stony skin, you have to remind yourself that what it once was has changed entirely. A sequoia transformed into a rock wall. The language of trees turned to silence. Given the right conditions, the elements moving perfectly into place, it’s only a matter of time.
The Wild
I met Pete the summers I spent working in West Yellowstone, Montana, the tiny town situated just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I was a freshman in college and had never lived away from home. A senior in high school, he hadn’t either. I’d also never had a boyfriend. Pete tied and sold flies over at Jacklin’s Fly Shop and dreamed of being a fly fishing guide one day. More experienced outdoors than I was, he naturally held a youthful energy for the place while developing a kind of wisdom I always envied. Each time we drove through Yellowstone Park, he recited to me the scientific names of the wolves, elk, and buffalo, those gorgeous Latin words decorating our conversations: Canis lupus, Cervus canadensis, and the comically redundant Bison bison, which always made me laugh. He even knew the scientific name of the lichen growing on the rocks (Pleopsidium), and older fishermen remarked to me how adept he was on the river, especially for an eighteen-year-old. I was proud, of course, of finding someone so unique. Instead of flowers, he brought me the best flies he’d tied for the week, and I stuck them in my ball cap and wore them all summer, woolly buggers and caddisflies flapping against my head in the breeze.
Read MoreBy Megan Blankenship
Resorted to, mostly, if remembered at all,
retiring into sheds and cellars, pillaring
cobweb palaces, inscrutable of purpose
to modern eye, called by sea
and smoke language as rare whiskeys are—
to be savored the utterances bradawl, froe,
chamfer plane, though as worthy
the guileless post hole digger,
the leprechaun spokeshave.
Let these fine things be loved again
for the simple works accomplished, each
according to ability, not asked too much of,
but trusted—more, at least, than motor.
Bless the place where handle narrows
to fit the grip, smoothed and oiled
against palms, generations of palms—yes,
the very word of satisfaction made flesh.
When a tool like that is taken up
in singleness of aim, it is a gospel.
As if you yourself were the relic barn
kneeling now, almost a heap,
lit wax-yellow in patchy beams
where shakes have rotted through,
having long outlived builder and all hope
of livestock, into which one afternoon
an unaccountable hand reaches
and from needles, nests,
and many other implements rusted
nearly past discernment, grasps
the necessary one, squares up,
and drives it once more into dirt.
By Alan Shapiro
Early mornings as I turned onto the gravel road to the bird sanctuary,
you’d start panting, pacing in the back seat, whining,
impatient to be let out and hit the ground at a dead run,
head cocked slightly to the side as if to query the sight or scent
of what I couldn’t see or smell of what you never stopped believing you would catch,
and never did. Always ahead of me or behind but never stride for stride,
you plunged, rustling, into and out of brush, you barked or didn’t,
you sniffed the freshest rumors of what had happened there while we were gone.
When you’d disappear, I’d call. And you only reappeared when I’d stop calling—
you must have thought my Here boy, come here boy was how I told you
not to worry, take all the time you need. Which is to say,
we each had our own experience of the experience we shared.
Our separate truths grew up inside those finite mornings.
They leaned on each other. But the mornings themselves?
Nothing outside them proves our ever having once been in them,
traceless as the sound of my calling after you
who rustled only as far into the understory as my voice would reach.
By Sara Fetherolf
You bring up
a detuned garble like a dear bone
unearthed from the garden
of your 2am sleep, upright
in bed, keyed
to your dream,
looking straight beyond
me as you sing.
All spring
with your wah wah and distortion
pedal, I’ve heard you playing
the Stormy Monday
Blues in other rooms.
I have eavesdropped
on the breaks, counted up
the bills to your lord-have-mercies.
If one of us
gets snake-bit, then,
it better be me. You’ll descend
with a five-bar
earworm to spring me from
the subterranean territories, blaze
trails through the lightless
pomegranate groves. No
god of death could fail to find
your full-throated tenor
convincing.
Your skin
in the dark is a lyre
string I touch to stop
resonating, and you
look back, confused
in the new silence, then drop
to sleep. And I come
tumbling after, down that long
chute, the future, where
we wait in the aftermath
of your song (tears
on the cheeks of Spring) and know
it was perfect, and fear
what’s gone is gone.
By Sara Fetherolf
A week after our wedding,
in New Orleans, on our long way
to California, when the afternoon
turned thunderstorm (salt & river
& old stone smell &
the dripping awnings we ran under),
we came upon the door
to the museum. I wanted to see
the Victorian death masks, hair lockets, embalmer’s tools,
obituary clippings. I imagined
a museum of ordinary,
sentimental tchotchkes for marking loss.
I imagined shadowboxes full
of letters with laced black borders, penning in
the old grief. I wasn’t expecting
the serial killer memorabilia (a Gacy
clown painting, the sagging prison panties
Aileen Wuornos wore), crime scene photographs,
car-crash snuff films, blood green-white
in the dusty filmstrip light.
I walked through the displays, viewing
a type of death I had somehow not seen
coming, hearing your footfall
in the next exhibit room. I like the idea
there are many versions of us,
spread through many universes, and dying
in one sends our consciousness rocketing back
to a universe where the death never
happened, our still-living
variations drawing our dead
selves in like iron filings
to a magnet—meaning every near accident
or pollutant worrying the lungs, every bad fall, childhood
illness, &c.—it all
simply concentrates us, makes us more
ourselves than ever, the one who has survived
everything, flickering
against the dust. But I began to see
(walking the rows where I could lift
a black velvet curtain to look
at executions, botched surgeries, the Black Dahlia)
how one day I would rocket back
to somewhere you are not—more myself
than ever, and you more
yourself elsewhere, a partition in between.
Last week we had fed
each other cake, which ahead of time
we had not quite agreed to do. I’d joked, then,
how one of us will have to feed the other
someday, maybe, anyway, so might as well
practice in a gleaming still-young summer,
and I was angry, almost, that I had to worry now
about your universe slipping off
from mine. Honestly, I was still angry about it,
that honeymoon afternoon
in the museum of death,
where the murder photos glowed, rainlit
and old already, each of them holding someone
who, if I’m right, was still alive
in the universe where they are the one
who goes on forever. Maybe they were
even then in New Orleans, in that
rainstorm, having their fortune
read or browsing these walls that wee missing
their image. Before that day, I had
mostly felt, if not invincible, ready at least
to see what would happen next. And now
here I wasn’t. And outside the rain
had stopped like a watch. And never again
would the streets shine in that precise way.
By Jessica Lee Richardson
Maybe it’s because I was born with my feet turned in and the doctor had to break them and stick me in casts as a little kid, but I’m always afraid I’ll lose a body part. Lately it’s my fingers. I wear double mittens and chicken-squawk them in my pits when it’s cold. My mom says I have to take them out when we’re shoveling shit from the rottweiler cages or else I drop the shovels too much. I like the rottweilers. I feel bad for them stuck in cages with their shit until we come, and they pant like crazy to see us. We complain about the dirty quarters, but it’s not like it’s clean anywhere else.
The dogs belong to my mom’s friend who plays the piano. I’ve never met him, but we go to his house and clean the shit, and I play his piano to warm up my filthy hands. It’s always dark in the house and I don’t know why we don’t turn the lights on. The only other person I know with a piano is my mom’s friend who goes to Puerto Rico in the summers and collects sea glass and jars of cherry Jolly Ranchers. She thinks she was taken aboard an alien spaceship, which my mom thinks too. I’m crazy for the cherry candies.
When I tell my friends about the spaceship, they say that’s impossible, but don’t look so sure. “Wow,” they say. “Do you think they did experiments?” I don’t think so, but I go with it, because these friends have pretty voices. I like listening to them sing in the school bathroom with the square tiles like hard pieces of gum. All I bring to the table are secondhand aliens and a talent for doing U.K. accents.
Read MoreBy Alan Sincic
And get this. Winners may be invited to an awards ceremony. A gathering of persons. Chocolate. And punch. And puppies a possibility. Should they appear—red ribbon round the collar and powdered with talc and spritzed with Aqua Velva and the zest of the lime—greet them with a hearty aloha. Take a knee. Unlimber the limbs. Up over the bone of the ankle they paddle to lick the back of the hand.
Rumor has it the winners get a plaque, mahogany slab with a topper of bronze no thicker than a slice of deli ham. Winner it says, and Cock Of The Walk, and I Told You So. Onto the face of the plaque they Dremel the name of the winner. That’s right. The winner gets a name. And a rub-down. A vigorous scrubbing with the pumice and the salt to obliterate the name tattooed at birth upon the butt. Away with the stain of the semen, the squall of the suckling, the bloody sheet of the afterbirth. With a branding iron they burn, onto the brow of the winner, a better name. Tab or Rock. Meg or Bo or Liz or God.
A single syllable, see, so when you speak it, it pops. The bells in the tower ring, the buffalo stir, the river swells and the bank overflows and the salmon leap, up into the arms of the fisher folk leap, and onto the griddle and onward, onto the plate and into the belly of the Mayor with the key to the city in the palm of that salmon-scented hand of his. The key to the city! And flowers. And bushels of corn.
Read More
By Jen McClanaghan
Featured Art: “In the Garden” by Tina Moore, Tiffany Grubb, Alexis Rhinehart, Casey Collins, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)
I look for you in travel plazas.
In claw machines. In corn husks, crank
shafts, coils and pumps, in funnels.
I look for you at breakfast
and again at dusk. I look in
weather, in dust, in bird song, in barking.
In the magnetic field of the wildflower.
In sockets, in closets, in strangers.
In Spanish, in rain’s silver fringe.
In the hawks that land to look at me.
In the splinter that entered my thumb
from a drawer that belonged to you,
could it be? I hold the cheap pens
in your purse. I spend money on shoes
to make myself feel like you.
I dreamt you were on my deck
with your eyes closed.
In your dresses I fold
for someone else, I see how tiny you were.
I watched the intern take your pulse
and wondered if he was shy or right
when he said you were gone.
On the form for your flight from ICU
to morgue to mortician to oven, to me,
I guessed you were a hundred pounds,
so light you could be made of helium.
You could be made of air
and be everywhere.
Of a world made of so many unlikely things,
of the mongoose’s ability to kill
the cobra, of consciousness,
of time before the beginning,
before the two of us, of death, I see you
enter the light above my shoulder
and read what I’ve written.
All this for you. This alphabet
you shed in June, this word
and the next and this final sentence
a fence of roses that can only be you.
By Steve Coughlin
We commend your anonymity—
how you move among us
on the subway
and up stairwells
of nondescript buildings.
We commend how you expect
nothing more
than to be an extra
in the background
of our lives
as we flee into restaurants
escaping the hustle of sidewalks
to be seated at important
tables reserved hours
in advance. At the summer concert series
you ask to be nothing
but the distant blurry face
in our pictures. And when our lives
devolve into arguments
at the park—when one of us
accuses another one
of us with words
that shatter—you’re the one
on your bike
who takes no notice
but moves through the day
with placid ease.
Oh Man in a Baseball Cap
thank you
for providing
necessary texture
to these moments of our lives!
And even more
thank you
for asking nothing of us
as we experience the treacherous depths
of human experience—
our conflicts and contradictions—
upon this stage
where we can’t stop believing
some audience
in some abstract way
observes us
and feels deeply
for our struggles
as you sit in the background
sipping a drink
hunched over a life without need.
By Steve Coughlin
You remember the evening chill
of New Hampshire
in the middle of summer
and your parents
not fighting—your father
not packing a suitcase
to spend three months
among stained carpets
at the Willow Motel—
but sitting with your mother
on the front porch
of the small A-frame cabin
by Echo Lake
where the water was not dangerous
and the gathering clouds
remained rumbling
upon a distant shore
while from inside
a radio played big band music
as your father shuffled cards
and your mother tapped her foot
and you knew
as long as you sat
on the front porch swing—
as long as you continued rocking
with quiet ease—
there’d be no cracks
in the safety
of this feeling that promised
if you moved through life
so lightly—if you stepped
with care
upon the thinnest layers of discontent—
your parents’ shadows
gently cast by the porch light
would remain distinct
and real
and forever before you.
New Ohio Review 