Featured Art: The Toilers of the Sea by Albert Pinkham Ryder
Facebook Sonnet
by Tanya Grae
Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 21
Someone thinks I’m beautiful again
& likes posts of my day, comments.
I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable—
bungeed off ether & the interplay.
Punch-drunk in this blue-sky space,
a rush of the past, the in-between,
whole chapters, I open annuals
& albums from storage. His change
in status: single. Papers in hand,
this backlit man heaves toward
the kite’s trailing end: What if?—
that butterfly. My youngest lights
onto my lap. Who’s that?—
as a key turns the lock, I log off.
Depleted Uranium and Other Facebook Posts
by Okla Elliot
Originally published in New Ohio Review issue 19
We read about depleted uranium
and try to imagine the scientific facts
about depleted uranium.
What does depleted even mean in the context of uranium?
So we Google it and learn something horrendous.
Or rather something interesting
that has been turned to horrendous purpose.
And so we join a protest against depleted uranium
even though our friends tell us there are more pressing
matters right here at home. How can you post
on Facebook about depleted uranium? our friends ask.
And so we post on Facebook about whatever
our friends have told us is most important to post
on Facebook about, and people stop thinking
about depleted uranium, though it still decays
its way into the cells of Iraqi children—and adults too,
but it is less effective to post on Facebook about the suffering
of adults, so I’ll only mention the children whose lymph nodes
and livers and lungs are mutating
due to depleted uranium. Or rather, I won’t,
since my friends tell me there are more pressing matters
here at home.
Tanya Grae is the author of Undoll (YesYes 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and other places. She lives in Tallahassee and is currently a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. Find out more at tanyagrae.com
Okla Elliott was an assistant professor at Misericordia University. His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His books include The Cartographer’s Ink and Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker (translation). He died in 2017.
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