Author: newohioreviewonlineissues
Amtrak Psalm
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: An Uhlan (mounted soldier with a pike) by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille (1848-1912)
The sway-backed horses of Lompoc don’t spook anymore.
They keep their muzzles pressed, sharing a pulse
while you clatter past, invisible in tinted business class.
And whose business are you minding anyway
as you peek into the pitbull’s backyard wreckage,
glimpse the bad cuts and dye-jobs of students smoking
behind Oxnard’s International College of Beauty? Camarillo,
Moorpark, Simi Valley, recede into heat-shimmer oblivion.
At home, your daughter’s behind a closed door
with Carnivorous Red nails posting stories that dissolve.
The entire universe big-bangs away from her irreducible center
of disdain. I’ll be gone soon enough, you want to say.
So this afternoon you’ve fallen in love with the common
mourning dove, tilting at the wind on his coil of razor wire.
You’re rooting for the tag crew artists
in their neverending arms race with Parks & Rec.
Boomer and Lil’ G, Fatlip and The Dog, Fraho, Buzz,
Rollin’ Sixty and Bashr. Naming themselves
over and over in the middle of the night, learning
like Buddhist masters the lessons of impermanence.
And now you’re waving at ranks of garden gnomes—
little domestic terra cotta soldiers waiting to be found
in the Burbank Home Depot back lot. I see you, you whisper
through the glass at their earnest bearded faces.
I see every one of you.
Read More
“Take the Neck Step Against Aging”
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666)
Today my wife bought a twin pack of neck-tightening cream
for me, and I’m trying not to take offense.
It’s not that I haven’t noticed the thinning crepe paper
over my Adam’s apple, or the way it bunches when I tie a tie,
but I guess I had hoped she would be my accomplice
in pretending. The book I’m reading’s called The Denial of Death.
It says civilization’s an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism
against the knowledge of our mortality. And yet I can’t help but hope
this cream will work. My wife learned from her mother
who learned from her mother, and so on, how the crushed
bark powder of a Thanaka tree, abraded in water and a stone dish,
will form a milky paste that protects the faces of the ones you love.
Do you know how it feels to have a woman massage her history
deep into your skin? So we pretend this is a Costco twin-pack of Thanaka
and that we have all the time in the world as she opens the jar,
warms the cream between her palms and wraps her slender fingers
around my throat. It’s one thing to try to bridge the basic duality between
the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meaning
with neck cream. It’s another to trust a woman’s hands around your throat.
“Point your chin up,” she says, cradling my head in her lap.
I’m hoping we’re part of something eternal, but if not,
that the decline of our bodies will be gradual and in tandem, and
that we will continue to be startled every March when
the flock of cedar waxwings reappears in the clattering branches
of the apple tree outside our window. See how their little masks hide
fatigue as they settle in by the dozens, Lone Ranger faces all pointed
in the same direction. Just one night in our tree on their long trip
from the sun-lashed Yucatan to the tundra of the Northwest Territories
Read More
Requiem with “Little Wing”
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Kenyon Cox (1856-1919)
Perhaps, on your downtown lunch stroll
in unseasonably cheery weather,
you walk up on a flock of grackles
on the ground in front of Urban Outfitters,
their impact marks still drying on the window
recently washed to display Big Sur Ribbed Pullovers
and the Willow Fuzzy Drawstring Teddy,
as if anyone believes October’s still a sweater month.
Perhaps you become suddenly dizzy,
a strange gravity drawing you toward this constellation
of twitching black holes
opened in the sidewalk at your feet.
And perhaps this brings to mind
how it feels when your face falls from your face.
In the old days before the imminent apocalypse,
the pattern would be read as omen:
a toothache’s coming on, the breath of your bride-to-be
will sour every time she walks in moonlight,
your best cow will soon grow milk-sick.
The prescriptions would be just as clear:
wash your warp and dye it while a new moon waxes;
steal a neighbor’s crickets and install them in your hearth;
milk with one hand only.
Perhaps, even now, you try to read in the little bodies
some feathered correspondence: this relates to that.
If you step on a crack, the snowy plover will slip
into extinction; if you breathe out while passing a cemetery,
Greenland’s ice shelf will break off and float away.
But the letters blur and you can’t discern the news
from the wrecked wings and necks.
On Ongoingness: A Conversation with Ada Limon and Jaswinder Bolina
Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk
David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”
And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?
Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]
Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.
Read MoreNew Ohio Review Issue 16 (Originally printed Fall 2014)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 16 compiled by Hannah Hoover.
What Comes Next
By Maxine Scates
Featured art: A Flowering Cactus: Heliocereus Speciosus by Pierre-Joseph Redouté
Life’s police car, lights flashing, on the sidewalk
in front of McDonald’s and two boys on the bus stop,
one boy moving quickly away from the other
who raised his hands and dropped his pack as the officer
approached, gun drawn. But how did the cop know
which one he wanted since both wore watch caps
and gray parkas and carried backpacks? He seemed
certain enough as he handcuffed the boy
then helped him into the back of the cruiser
his now gunless hand almost gently dipping the boy’s head
into what comes next, all we don’t see swallowing him, the
signal changing, day swallowing me until this morning
Read More
Small Boy
By Joseph Scapellato
Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender
Featured Art: Pepita by Robert Henri
The small boy says to his big sister, “Why did we kill all the Indians?”
They’re in the basement playing a video game. Both of them are white.
“We didn’t kill them,” says his big sister, “our ancestors did.”
“Why did our ancestors kill all the Indians?”
“Okay, not really our ancestors because Dad’s family came in the 20s and Mom’s in the Sixties and the Indians were already totally dead by then, mostly.”
“Why did ancestors kill all the Indians?”
“But I guess you could say it was us, pretty much, because today we’re basically the same culture as the culture of the people who killed the Indians back then. And it’s ‘Native Americans,’ not ‘Indians.’ ‘Indians’ is ignorant.”
The small boy says to his angry stepmom, “Why did we kill all the Native Americans?”
They’re returning from the grocery store in hardly any traffic. Plastic bags stuffed with food rustle in the back seat.
Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark
By Theresa Burns
Featured Art: Flowers in a Vase by Odilon Redon
And now, instead of staring at the weeds
and broken bottles from the train platform,
we’re taking in a scene from a Monet.
Asters, cosmos, little yellow fists
of something. All random and confetti.
I’m half expecting a lady in a high-waist
dress and bonnet to appear on a diagonal
stroll through its splendor, pausing
with her parasol so we can selfie with her.
Maybe she’ll hop aboard the light rail
to the Amtrak station, get off in D.C.,
step back into the painting she escaped from.
Who was the genius who thought of this?
What meadow-in-a-can Samaritan
got sick of passing the four-acre eyesore
on the way to work? Shook pity into blossom.
To whom do I write my thank you?
Mayor, surveyor, county clerk, church lady.
Who marched down to city hall, begged
anyone who would listen?
Putting Girls on the Map
By Irene Keliher
Featured Art: Orchid Blossoms by Martin Johnson Heade
Only a few students competed in Kingston Junior High’s first geography bee and nobody came to watch. We lined up in the band room submerged in our flannel shirts, fidgeting, happy to escape sixth period. Pine trees pressed the window. No one expected to win except me, though I wouldn’t admit it and tried my best to look bored. I tucked my hands into my baggy Adidas jacket, the only brand-name clothing I owned—I almost never took it off—poised to triumph if I could answer the next question. Mrs. Raymond, chubby purveyor of the world to our damp county, read us questions from a stapled packet stamped National Geographic Society.
“What world river has seen the greatest number of refugees cross its shores?” She pronounced ref-u-gees in three careful beats and looked mournful, as if uncertain there could be an answer to such a question.
Read More
Mango Languages
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: Still Life with Birds and Fruit by Giovanna Garzoni
—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein
In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.
Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)
In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.
Buzz Can Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis and the New American Fascism
by Michael Mark Cohen
The exquisitely named Berzelius Windrip, known to all as “Buzz,” is the fictional politician and “Ringmaster Revolutionist” who ousts FDR from the Democratic ticket in 1936 and gets himself elected dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s speculative novel It Can’t Happen Here. No uniformed buffoon like Italy’s Il Duce, nor an awkward, vegetarian mystic like Adolf Hitler, President Buzz Windrip is a decidedly American kind of fascist.
“This Time I’m Going to Fool Somebody”: Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation
By Dustin Faulstick
Featured Art: The politician’s corner by Honoré Daumier, 1864
“Folks,” roars Willie Stark on the eve of his impeachment trial, “there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figured I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they’re saying back in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state.” From his colloquial diction and insults to his collegial banter with his own supporters, from his invocation of corruptly used tax money to his reference to the sacredness of the ballot, Stark identifies himself as one of the people. Before neurosurgeon Ben Carson or business moguls Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump, farm-boy-turned-lawyer Willie Stark was the ultimate political outsider.
Read More
Take Me to Your Lady Leader
By Kristen Lillvis
Featured Art: Profile of Shadow by Odilon Redon, 1895
Contact, Carl Sagan’s best-selling 1985 science-fiction novel, tells of alien shape-shifters, wormhole-traveling spacecraft, and—perhaps the most fantastical element of the bunch—a female president. Yet Contact’s protagonist, Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, compares President Lasker to her predecessors with no acknowledgment of their gender difference, noting that Ms. President demonstrates an appreciation for science seen in “few previous American leaders since James Madison and John Quincy Adams.” Despite her tie to the presidential establishment—and regardless of Sagan’s attempt to make her gender unremarkable—President Lasker still fulfills the function particular to women world leaders in literature. Whether she erodes or extends existing gender stereotypes, the female president operates as a sign of the apocalypse or, at least, a harbinger of the unfamiliar, a reminder to readers that they have entered a world drastically different from their own.
The fictional female commander-in-chief, as she appears in texts such as Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man (2002-2008) and Harold Coyle’s The Ten Thousand (1993), figures as both progressive and absurd: She points to future possibilities while highlighting our stunning lack of progress. Since literary representations both shape and are shaped by real-world situations, it may come as no surprise that Hillary Clinton’s own presidential run has had few fictional precursors and that reactions to it have followed their patterns of possibility and putrescence. Let’s look at some of the extreme responses that Clinton’s campaign has brought about. For every “I’m with Her” T-shirt and tweet, we see misogynistic pins mocking the “otherness” of her body and hear public calls for her imprisonment or execution. Tens of thousands have “liked” or retweeted the claim that “corruption and devastation follows [sic] her wherever she goes,” a statement her opponent released the night Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination. The range of reactions indicates that a Clinton presidency marks an apocalypse of sorts for some, one that is widening as the election unfolds.
Read More
Of the People, for the People, by the Robots
By Christopher A. Sims
Featured Art: Triumph of the Moon by Monogrammist P.P., 1500/10
American fiction has its small share of memorable politician characters—Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Robert Leffingwell in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent to name a pair—but there’s a strand of this tradition that is becoming more relevant in 2016: Artificial Intelligence politician figures in the work of two of our most prominent science-fiction writers, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.
While SF traditionally serves as a space to explore futuristic ideas, Asimov’s 1950 I, Robot and Dick’s 1960 Vulcan’s Hammer can now be reread as prescient visions of the looming potentiality of an AI political leader (perhaps as early as 2024, if Joe Biden chooses not to run).
As the so-called “Internet of Things” takes shape and works to synthesize the physical with the cyber, we can begin to speculate about how long it will be before AIs take over even our most complicated tasks, such as governance. But the genius of Asimov and Dick lies not in their depiction of the technologies that make AI leaders possible; instead, it’s in their assumption that we will one day, not too long from now, be faced with a critical choice between human and mechanical rule. That, it’s fair to say, will be a consequential election.
Read MoreWhen a Friend Writes of her Pregnancy
By Josephine Yu
Heft up the door of the storage unit
where you sequestered the baby
things after the second miscarriage.
Board books, plush animals,
clothes sorted in file boxes
like evidence in a cold case. Kneel there
on the concrete floor. Choose a gift
to send her—act of penance
for the low sob that groaned
from your chest like the cry
of some prehistoric flightless bird.
Penance for the bad math that clacks
its abacus beads: one infant plus
one infant equals zero infants.
Fold footie pajamas in tissue,
as if relayering an onion. Scrape
curling ribbon with a scissor blade
until grief sloughs off
like charred skin debrided. This,
this is your feat of strength,
a woman lifting a car
off a toddler.
That terrified. That furious.
Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, and other journals and anthologies. She is a faculty member at Keiser University and a hospice volunteer.
Originally appeared in NOR 27.
When the Doctor Calls After the Final Round of IVF
By Josephine Yu
It’s a good thing he caught you on the threshold
of Publix, so you can cross into
that tiled acreage of plenty.
When you’re pushing a cart with a temperamental
wheel, you won’t cry. When you’re putting
chicken salad with tarragon and almonds
into the cart, you won’t weep, and choosing
a tray of ground chuck, plump under Saran Wrap,
you won’t howl.
Stacking cups of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt
into the cart, you wouldn’t dream
of collapsing on the tiles in a spectacular
Old Testament hair-pulling fit—not there
before the stoicism of buttermilk,
the solemn dignity of Greek yogurt.
As you reach into the frozen food case, hand above
a bag of mixed vegetables, an old voice
appears in your head, as clear
as the piped-in Billy Joel, that familiar voice
insisting calmly, I told you
you were worthless, didn’t I?
You and your moldy rat turd eggs that will never
make a living thing, and you wait, numb
in the artificial cold, and let that voice say
the truth it has to say with its smug authority,
and then lay the bag of peas, carrots, and lima beans
on the metal seat where the infant would sit.
Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, and other journals and anthologies. She is a faculty member at Keiser University and a hospice volunteer.
Originally appeared in NOR 27.
American Horror
By Jessica Alexander
You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so
full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red,
to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and
the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like
a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went
braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is
that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take
one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling
they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that
played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my
top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about
blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American.
So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde
girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or
James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts,
that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart
into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium
again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless
in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window
breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The
sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw
my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what
happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.
Read More
The Tour
By. Erica S. Arkin
It occurred to Dennis six hours into the road trip that he might have made a terrible mistake. His daughter Natalie sat on a fold-down seat in the back of his pickup’s not-so-extended cab, plugged into her Discman and propped against the small window behind the empty passenger seat. She was reading a magazine with a cover that said something about Bedroom Tricks to Blow . . . Dennis only caught a glance when she’d pulled it from her backpack at the last rest area. He was glad he couldn’t see the whole thing in the rearview mirror.
Read More
One Night
By Jeff Knorr
Featured Art: Sarina’s Flowers by Sarina Winner, Nancy Dick, Wendy Minor Viny
But not just any night,
on the 26th floor of the New Otani Hotel
the night of your aunt’s wedding
your new uncle and I threw centerpieces,
beautiful flowers in glass volleyball-sized
vases out of the window of their hotel room
in downtown L.A. We dropped them, in
amazement, the air flattening petals of roses,
the baby’s breath. They blew out
like cannon balls on the sidewalk—
flowers, soil, Styrofoam, glass. Ten times
we could have killed someone with one of those
centerpieces, our drunkenness—
it could have been over as soon as it started.
Your aunt’s anger flared hot as a brand.
We could be wearing the same prison orange.
I escaped some wild death, manslaughter
by wind, by stupid luck, but you on the other hand
drive the car through our neighborhood,
stop for a cigarette with friends, have brown skin–
you ride, get pulled over, the cops
looking for you and your brothers.
Read More
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations: Dial 2 for Inmate Information
By Jeff Knorr
Featured Art: Winter Dreaming of Spring by Nancy Dick, Norman Calkanic, Kate Goreman, Patty Mitchell, and David Dewey
What information could you possibly deliver—
that he’s safe, that the kite he put in
for the GED has come through.
If you know the party’s extension you wish
to speak to, you may dial it at any time.
To dial his reference number
and have a phone ring in his cell.
Otherwise hold for a representative—
Information, Officer Medeiros speaking.
Yes, Officer Medeiros, can you wander
over to dorm C, bed 211
and check on my son for me?
Can you tell me what he’s been fed the last two weeks?
Can you check if the light flickering
above his bed at all hours has been fixed,
Instead I ask, is he allowed to
receive packages yet, new books?
Read More
Passion Works
The art in this summer online edition emerges from Passion Works Studio, a collaborative community arts center located in Athens, Ohio, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. “At the heart and soul of Passion Works is a core group of practicing professional artists with developmental differences. Offered a responsive structure, quality materials and welcoming space the artists reciprocate with wildly imaginative, beautiful creations that are fresh and approachable. Passion Works Studio invites makers of all abilities to work and thrive within partnerships celebrating the power of creativity, connection, and purpose.” New Ohio Review is proud to present these vibrant pieces as complements to our contributors’ writing.
We Can Fry Anything
By Abby E. Murray
Featured Art: Sunshine by Bill Dooley, John Marquis, Wendy Minor Viny
I’m at the fair to test
how American my blood cells are
and whether my heart
is the monster pumpkin I forced
from the mouth of a flower,
big as a tractor and thirsty AF.
When I say give me something fried
I don’t mean cubes of cheesecake
or spools of battered bacon,
I mean give me what I never thought
could be skewered in the first place,
give me executive orders,
give me stolen land
served on a stick and wrapped
in white paper smeared with oil.
I want to put my failures
on a Ferris wheel then watch them
pause at the top, ready to jump.
Read MoreAs Always
By Robert Lynn
on the first not quite warm day of March the park filled with the delusion of spring
our friends napped by the half dozen against a tree dogs gathered loose
bikini tops from sunbathers made maenads by 53 degrees we gave time away
in handfuls to the ducks pairs of men emerged from winter to wave lures
at the water an excuse to love each other without looking I read your
cheekbones’ anger at how I got more time than you before the good earth was
over fed you grapes the closest I could get to an apology for something I didn’t
choose someone sitting at our tree and very high asked Is this the Golden
Hour? and the light answered with yellow silence the way it does all questions
so obvious later walking you home I told a story how my parents fell in love
first drunk then again sober only after I existed I didn’t think you were
listening until the moment you stopped mid path mid sentence a way of making
me turn around you told me There isn’t time to do anything twice How
come? you let the light give its yellow reply I don’t want the world to end
you said when it does I will remember it this way the sun picking mulch from
your backlit hair your fresh burnt shoulders making the gesture for All this?
and I give up at the same time this last first day before the good earth was done
Read More
Fourteen Meals
By Stephanie Early Green
Featured Art: Happy Couple Jason Douglas and Mallory Valentour
The first meal we share is ribeye steak with scalloped potatoes and three wilted strands of asparagus cowering on the side of each plate. He takes one bite of potato. I pretend to cut my steak but don’t eat any. I don’t want to ruin my lipstick, or get steak-fat caught in my teeth. We talk about our families, and how we both value the concept of family, and how we both hope to have families of our own someday. We agree that we have a ton in common. We find out that we both enjoy country music and have corny senses of humor. We tell each other knock-knock jokes. Mine are better, but I laugh at his, while still trying to look pretty. It’s difficult to laugh out loud and not look a little ugly, a little wild. The trick is to keep your eyes open, and gently scrunch your nose, but not open your mouth too wide, so as not to expose your gums. When a man sees a woman’s gums, he is put in mind of a horse, or a chimpanzee. That’s what my grandmother always said, anyway, and she was a smart woman.
After dinner, we kiss. His breath tastes like white wine and scalloped potato. I hope my breath smells minty fresh, since I snuck a breath-mint while no one was looking. When the date is over, I’m ravenous. I go to my hotel room and order a burger, no bun. It comes with French fries, even though I didn’t order them. I eat the burger with a fork and knife while sitting on the vast hotel bed. I watch a trashy reality show in which women drink and cry and hug and scream. I would never make such a spectacle of myself on television, shrieking and clawing, mascara running down my cheeks. I’d sooner die. As I take the last bite of hamburger, a blotch of ketchup falls on my white hotel bathrobe. Later, I fall asleep with the television on, and have strange dreams. When I wake up, there’s a French fry on my pillow, curled sweetly next to my cheek.
Read More
I Should Know a Millionaire
By Erik Wilbur
Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams
two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.
I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.
You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light
on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting
all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,
tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up
the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling
to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—
if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.
Read More
Preparations
By Madeleine Cravens
Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor
I worry what it says about my character,
that I cannot picture the reality of sickness,
I just wake and read Whitman
and watch the sun on the brick
of the next-door apartment.
I have three cans of chickpeas,
freezer-burned strawberries,
half a bottle of wine. You have
a stronger sense of the anthropocene.
You buy soup, talk with your father.
You know microbes are alive
as they move across the grid.
And in France each small town
has a street named for Pasteur,
who made men dig drains,
convinced them to stop spitting.
I wash my hands with hot water.
I don’t want to be clean. What does it say
that I am fully on my knees to this,
that I admit such weakness willingly,
that should you want company
after any of your transatlantic flights
I would take a cab immediately
to your red and burning door.
Read More
The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly
By Gail Martin
Featured Art: Cicadas by Scott Brooks and Wendy Minor Viny
Real life was finally about to begin.
Remember the romance of the silver cigarette case
in college? The integrity of your firstborn’s eyelashes?
We discarded alternate destinies like tired cards
in the Flinch deck. We were only looking forward.
Of course, like the teeth of beavers and horses, there
are parts of the past that never stop growing.
Garage – tree house – vacant lot kinds of cruelty–
how we took turns being mean.
And later, some serrated evenings, dinners
of bluster and recoil, dodge. Flowers sent
or not sent to someone’s funeral.
Mostly there are the years you watch
your neighbors’ cars slide in and out of their garage.
Between blue herons and tumors, you change
the sheets.
We were all surprised to find ourselves old
but really the signs were everywhere, and we
acknowledge we’d been told. Name one
important thing that has not already happened.
Read More
The Helms Man
By Kathryn Jordan
Featured Art: Creative Abundance Flower by Wendy Minor Viny
The Helms Man, we called him. I mean the man in white
baker’s trousers who drove the Helms Bakery van
around our bright California cul-de-sacs and streets —
coastal hills carved to asphalt, tract, and pink ice
plant that we broke open to write on sidewalks.
He drove slowly down our block, stopping to open
wide temptation’s door, inviting adolescent girls in
to view his wares: jelly and glazed doughnuts,
cinnamon twists, sparkling crystal sugar. We ponied
up quarters for paper bags of treats, to be consumed
out of sight of perfect mothers, lying out in lawn chairs,
all Coppertone and Tab gleam, who gave us Teen Magazine,
left us to banana and milk diets, vertical stripes, and scales.
Left us to ripe womanhood and the gaze of men,
to shape and flavor we could never taste ourselves.
To motherhood and stretching of skin, joint loosening,
the joy of being food. Then cronehood with arroyo
of wrinkle, slump of breast, lump of belly.
Each one alone now sees herself in hollow mirror,
flattened chest, belly bulge assessed, while outside
the window, teenage girls parade in short cutoffs,
long legs supple and smooth. And our long-gone
mothers watch us watch them. We, who still hear
the van coming and run, hurry, to be ready, radiant
and thin for the helmsman, just turning the corner.
Read More
The Pathologist’s Wife (or, When My Daughter Leaves the House I Will Go Watch Baby Sea-Turtles Being Born in Savannah)
By Jeff Tigchelaar
Featured Art: American Gothic by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor Viny
Volunteer vacations. That’s what
I’ll do, so help me. Go away
for a week at a time or two. You know, have fun,
help out. Save some
baby turtles. And I’m not going
to ask. It’s my money too. Money’s not
an issue. My husband’s
a doctor. Well not
just a doctor, my Lord: a forensic pathologist.
More of a scientist, really. He puts away
murderers. We’ve had – he’s had
death threats. We’re absolutely
not in the phone book. And he is
so addicted to his work. He’s always thought
he can just hand me money and
that’s it. Though, he does expect his
meals.
Read More
Laywoman
By Jeff Tigchelaar
Featured Art: Blue Cat by Dar Whitlatch, Jason Douglas, Mallory Valentour
Evenings, let me tell you, are for
coming down. Going home and getting
into bed. Or slippers, at least. Yeah I’ve got bunny slippers
and there’s no shame in that. My only child
is insane. I don’t care who thinks
what about my PJs, either. I sleep
in a faded 4X orange and green T-shirt worn for years
by my father before me. So thin you can see my nips.
If you were looking, that is.
At the mercantile today I couldn’t stop thinking
about how I always just keep looking – nodding –
at Dr. Prajeet even when I haven’t
the slightest what he’s on about.
How hard would it be
– wink – just to say “Dr. Prajeet,
if you wouldn’t mind reiterating a bit –
you know . . . in laywoman’s terms?” Just ask him.
Laywoman, Dr. Prajeet. That’s me.
I wonder what I’d say if Dr. P. asked me
to elope. Off to some far land. Or even if he just asked me
out. Dancing, maybe. Here in town. I wonder what my little
Richie would think about that. If you don’t want mommy
coming home with doctors, don’t be a grown man living
with mom. Maybe I’d say that to old Mr. Ricardo.
Read More
He’s Fine with a Little College (or, All Those Pups)
By Jeff Tigchelaar
Featured Art: Atlas the Pup by Troy Goins and Mallory Valentour
College is for people who think
they’re too good to work.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m fine
with a little college, as long as it’s
in a Lego set, like.
But the kind with full-size
buildings and professors . . .
that right there’s a different sack of bait.
But you know what? Life’s like a dogsled team.
Unless you’re in the lead, the scene don’t change.
All those pups, yipping and chomping
to get ahead and be up front . . . but
the top dog’s been chosen from the start.
And that one mutt might not have to
have his nose up the asshole in front of him,
but guess what he’s got right behind him. A dog.
And another dog, and another and another. A whole
damn pack, and a few feet back there’s a sled
and you know who’s standing on that sled?
The man.
Read More
Smart Girl
By Sydney Rende
Featured Art: Cicada by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour
My ex-boyfriend calls from Florida to talk about his pubes.
“Are they weird?” he asks.
We go to schools in different time zones. Over the summer he broke up with me on the patio furniture in his backyard. I cried into his lap. He carried me to my car, then went inside to eat dinner with his family.
Now he plays lacrosse on scholarship at a school with palm trees and a rape problem.
“Why would your pubes be weird,” I say. My roommate, Jenny, shuts her laptop and listens from her bed.
“You tell me.” He’s angry with me for not telling him about the strangeness of his pubic hair. Why would I care about his pubic hair? One time he shaved the peachy space between his eyebrows with a disposable razor. I thought that was weird, but I never told him.
“The guys on the team are saying my pubes are weird,” he says. “Like I have too many.”
“Did you tell them you’re from New Jersey?” I ask. Jenny moves to my bed, holds her ear to the phone. She covers her mouth so he can’t hear her breathing. I want to tell her that her breath is the last thing on his mind. His pubes take precedent over her breath or my breath or even his own breath, and he needs to sort out the pube situation before he asphyxiates.
“Tell them how cold it gets at home,” I say. “How you need all the hair you can get to stay warm in the winter.”
Read More
Donna Was Not a Cat Person
By Halle Ruth
Featured Art: Chowder by Troy Goins
Donna forgot about the cat. She had promised to take care of it when her sister went on another one of her vacations. But the cat slipped to the bottom of Donna’s to-do list until he was barely hanging on, his presence barely noticed and left to his own devices, roaming her sister’s home on his lonesome. Donna did not want the cat staying in her own home, choosing to sacrifice the time it would take to drive to her sister’s to feed it every other day rather than let its fur coat her hardwood floors.
She woke early that morning and decided to take advantage of the rare combination of a day off and unusually warm October weather to tackle the overgrown landscaping surrounding the house. At the beginning of summer, she paid a neighborhood kid to pull weeds and lay mulch, but the upkeep fell to her, and she hadn’t been particularly diligent about keeping the crab grass at bay. Her husband suggested hiring the kid again, but Donna refused. Everyone else in the neighborhood either cared for their yards themselves or hired professionals who drove around in logo-covered trucks that hauled riding lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers. None of them cheaped out and hired a teenager to do a half-assed job to save a few dollars. It was embarrassing that they even hired him in the first place, like they couldn’t afford to do any better than that. Ella, who lived across the street, would have never done such a thing. Donna was sure of it.
Read MoreYou Start To Grow Old
By Haolun Xu
You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home.
Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.
You walk in with mystery.
People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.
You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world.
London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.
But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.
One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies.
It’s perfect. It’s yours,
you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it,
you start to smile more and more each time,
they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.
But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going,
they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.
And they stop asking for your name,
they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.
Read More
Memoir: Sacred
By Shelagh Connor Shapiro
Featured Art: Birds by Jonathan Salzman and Tibetan Monks visiting Passion Works Studio
Ohio
We sit in the car, my mother and I, outside a large white barn with black trim. It’s a pretty barn—less than a mile from our home—and my sister Maura keeps her horse here. The horse is Culotte. His previous owner called him “Just Cool It,” but Dad said that was too much of a hippy name. He is a proud Republican. During the last election, I picked up one of the dropped campaign buttons outside the voting booths. You aren’t allowed to wear the buttons inside. The vote is private, sacrosanct.
We have stopped, as we do each morning, for Maura to feed Culotte. In March 1972, I am nine. In five minutes or ten minutes, when Maura comes back to the car, Mom will drive me to the William E. Miller Elementary School. She will drive Maura to the parking lot of the A&P, where Mrs. Besaunceny and three other students meet every day to drive to Columbus School for Girls, an hour away. CSG has no room for me in the fourth grade class. I’ll join the fifth graders next year.
Our breath is frosty in the car. I ask my mother to repeat her question.
“If your Dad and I ever got a divorce, who would you want to live with?”
Read MoreSecond-Hand Tongue
By Tamara Miller
Once I bought a beautiful tongue at a second-hand store. It was an impulse buy; I probably paid more than it was worth, if it was even worth anything at all. After I got it home I felt a little ashamed and regretted my purchase. What did I need a second tongue for while my own just wasted away in my head, unused? But the thing about this new tongue was that it liked to wag. When my god-given tongue locked down tight against my teeth, this second tongue would start in, first about righteousness and then about salvation, until I realized something terrible: my new tongue had caught religion. It was a preaching kind of tongue, silvery and sly as the devil. I tried to silence it, with candy and pride and fear, the way you do with tongues, but it would not deviate from the path of righteousness it liked to march up and down my esophagus like a parade of Stormtroopers. Shut-up, I called with my other tongue. Please. Shut-up before someone hears us. Before someone realizes we are not who we say we are.
Read More
Difference
By Sara Moore Wagner
Featured Art: Floating Guy, collaboration between Passion Works Studio (Athens, Ohio) and Colores del Alma (Chile)
When I used to read my son the book
where the outcast girl becomes friends
with the alligator, where they dance
in the sewer to the burt-burp of her
tuba, I would imagine he was the gator,
that one day he might find someone
to teach him not to put everything
in his mouth, to go into the water
where he’s meant to return—when
I read my daughter that book, suddenly
I see the girl, tiny soft body in the mouth
of the gator, being pulled down into the
swamp with her tuba blaring. And
the story has always been about this gator,
how he’s not meant to live in regular
society, how neither is the girl so they
find each other and even though he eats
all the local dogs, he leaves her alone
and she saves him. When I am walking
with my daughter downtown, a man
comes up to me and moves his hands
around in my face, gestures at
my daughter until I’m lying
on the sidewalk with my arms around her,
folding her into me like a pair of socks
in a suitcase, like a lolling tongue into
a mouth. And I’m yelling at the construction
workers come help me—and they do,
rushing out in their orange vests. And I think
in that book, these would have been the villains;
in that book, my girl would have risen and danced
for the man who wanted to pull her out of me
like a tooth, would have shown him how to live
in the civilized world, how to cover
his fangs, let them out at night when the slow
lull of the Ohio river takes them so far away
from her home, from her mother that he
thinks about his nature. How even this
little make believe world wasn’t built
for the girl. How even still, it’s my girl’s favorite
book. How even still, I read it.
Read More
Iguana
By Jim Cole
Featured Art: Chameleon by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour
The New Girl’s boss was fired. Then, her boss’s boss was fired.
People said her boss’s boss had, like, this vein of ore trapped deep down in his large body – imbedded, inscrutable. When he said Good morning that wasn’t usually what he meant. When he laughed it was not at what you supposed. Inside, he longed to fire you.
Everyone said it. Her boss said it. Then he was fired. Her boss’s boss fired an old woman with a limp and a new pair of high heels, he fired a guy who went to his college, he fired a husband and wife who said they loved the company because they got to work together. Then, they got fired together. Everyone knew it: her boss’s boss yearned to fire; avoid him if you could. How many he’d fired, nobody could say. A dozen? Maybe twice that. His hit list was long – everyone. From a distance, and around corners, in the elevator and hallways and restroom stalls, outside on cigarette breaks, they talked about him, they joked nervous, and they called him something: the Reptile. When you talked to the Reptile, the air you breathed grew clammy. He smiled and was polite, he asked about your family’s well-being and your home appliances, and if your weekend was satisfactory and busy, and he looked at your surroundings, and said you had a nice workspace and to have a nice day, then you were fired. It was what he wanted, what satisfied the Reptile. It showed in his eyes and his stiff hair and his gait, in the way he exhaled or didn’t, the way he wore a pearl tie clasp on a pearl-colored tie, and how he pronounced the word bagel.
Read More
Memoir: I Went, Running
By Caroline Manring
Featured Art: Bird by Emmett Reese
. . .as if loss were a fire he was purified in again and again, until he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
–James Galvin, The Meadow
Running is the only thing that made sense to me after miscarrying at fifteen weeks pregnant. I had almost lost my own life as well, and spent three weeks in two different hospitals, linked by a trippy ambulance ride with an EMT who thought I couldn’t hear him singing along to U2. Pretty much everyone thought I was unconscious for much of my hospitalization. I wasn’t, of course, and between waves of Fentanyl I noted or hallucinated many searing moments, which, though warped by fear and pain, were still less bizarre than the daily life I had to get back to, eventually.
Even after I came home from the hospital, crying because I had to be wheeled out to the car, and even when I slept most of the day, propped on our eglantine couch with the help of ten or so lesser drugs, anything other than the thought of running again was absurd: people walking across the street? Ridiculous. They weren’t screaming. Sunsets? Ruthless. They ended everything, over and over and over. Someone else’s baby? An abrupt and tenacious violence; a violation of the possible, an extravagant body made radioactive by my pain, like a fur coat soaked with blood from a bucket I hurled myself.
Read More
Radiology
By Kim Garcia
Sitting on the x-ray dolly, gown fastened front to back,
steel girders propping the tracks of the x-ray cam,
resting in half-dark with a lead blanket
size and weight of a doormat over my belly
while the tech disappears behind the wall
and a light flashes blue and white,
then more waiting, every joint in need
of repair.
The cam floats over my body.
The tech touches me gently. He’s nearly bald
and pale in his scrubs. I sit up, hearing
a soft popping of cartilage as I swing
my knees over the side. Knee-capped
by nothing. I am so poorly
designed and executed that one might call
this incarnation accidental, unintended.
And against accident, what can I do but keep
intending?
So, bless the half-hearted pinging
of the Philips logo saving the screen.
Bless the lead aprons and blankets,
the plastic stretcher board hung
on hooks on the wall, the stacks
of towels and plastic gloves, the cream
and cocoa checkerboard tiles, the tech
with his soft hands in this cheerful wing
that promises nothing
the lame will not walk
the deaf will not hear
but more light
to see our suffering by.
Read More
Essay: Olympia Traveller de Luxe
By Robert Long Foreman
The Olympia Traveller de Luxe is not the same thing as the Olympia de Luxe.
They’re similar, sure. They’re both manual typewriters. They look like each other. But if someone said they were the same they’d be lying through their teeth. They’d be capable of anything.
The Olympia Traveller de Luxe does all the things the Olympia de Luxe does, but it’s far more compact. It doesn’t rise high off the table but keeps its head down; it’s three and a quarter inches tall, where the Olympia de Luxe is five and a half.
It can’t have been easy for Olympia’s engineers to take all the functions of the de Luxe and reproduce them in an even smaller model. But they did. And I’ve tried other typewriters of about the same size, like the Smith-Corona Skyriter and the Hermes Rocket. They’re nice, but they’re flawed. The page you’re typing on will slide out of place as you type. The hammers won’t strike hard unless you press hard.
Not so with the Olympia Traveller de Luxe. It’s small, but the letters it makes are bold—which helps convince its user that what they’re writing matters, that someone in the world will care about what’s on that page.
The words you make on it aren’t pixels on a screen but ink on paper. You can see them when the power goes out.
Read More
Sonnet with Hound and Sequins
By Robert Thomas
Featured Art: Yak by Mary Alice Woods, Jason Licht, and Tibetan Monks Visiting Passion Works Studio
I didn’t lose you to a matador
in flat slippers and a sequined jacket.
I didn’t lose you to a match’s glow
you followed into a hummingbird’s nest.
I didn’t lose you to Bruce or Abby,
though Bruce could bawl blues like a baying hound
and Abby danced like a leaf in a storm.
I didn’t lose you to a silent drum
or a curtain call or a summer sheen.
No, I lost you to incomparable
suave death in tights and tank top, his slick
disco two-step. While he took you for a spin
in his roadster, his red Alfa Spider,
I rode in the rain on his rumble seat.
Read More
Walker County Rites
By Cheyenne Taylor
Featured Art: Flea by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor
One average night you catch yourself
combing summer’s stour through your hair,
cutting the moon like fruit with a pocketknife.
The night undoes the hooks behind her back
for you, white freckles tossed across her skin.
Before the massless hoots of barred owls hail
you back to camp—your wet, unbaptized body
bruised by testing instinct—you’re convinced
that something’s watching. Fatwood fatigues.
You loom up to the fire, trusting heat. You say
I sort-of think, and I would like to pray,
and marvel at the coal barge hauling
light between banks. When someone thanks
the Lord for camp potatoes, aluminum foil,
rootstalks spread for tortoises, a mammal howls,
and you want all the earthly knowledges.
You steel yourself with whiskey for the river.
You plant yourself ashore and eat the dirt.
Read More
Self-Portrait as Minor Prophet
By Craig Van Rooyen
Not the one who foretells
our city become a jackals’ haunt
or our silver turned to dross.
Rather, the one who needs a grocery list
from his wife with the precise level of yogurt fat
underlined and the aisle number
for the hypo-allergenic soap
so he will not wander, masked, into
the floral section to be with orchids,
their double stems of moth wings
looking nothing like fields stripped by foreigners
or hands hinged in prayer.
Woe to you with more than 10 items
in express checkout, he may think.
Woe to you who do not stand six feet apart.
But he does not proclaim their downfall
or predict their cattle slaughtered, their
gardens trampled underfoot.
I have seen enough buying and selling by now
to know I am a product, packaged
for someone else’s comfort, and to know
in this too I will fail. The truth is, my people,
we were always sheltered alone
and for mysterious reasons never knew it.
After 24 years with one woman
I still wonder with whom I will awake:
Sword or plowshare; flint horse hoof
or threshing floor, wasteland or vineyard
where grape skins crack from the pressure
of flesh and juice answering sun.
The Universe is Just One of Those Things That Happens from Time to Time
By Jacob Griffin Hall
Featured Art: Stacked Animals by Jonathan Salzman
I deposit my tired universe of bones
beside the farmhouse. Discrete, the butterfly weed
with its leaves tapered to a soft point
leans against the lower stem of a coneflower.
I eat sweet bread and strawberries
and stare into the pocket of oaks dawdling
at the far edge of the field. I draw rings in the clouds
with my outstretched finger, the posture
not unlike accusation, the hair erect at the brush
of a spider against an exposed ankle. The only choice
is how far to carry a burden. I’ve known
the most ordinary people, autumn, untamed piles
of burning leaves. I’ve watched from a safe distance
and disregarded the intensity with which I scratched
my wrist, the skin slick and glinting
beneath a series of similar suns. I’ve negotiated
my right to fathom the bodies of insects.
It’s going well so far. I’ve given up
chocolate bars and late nights and thoughts
of making my life a metaphor. Still the coneflower
is nimble atop its spread of fibrous root.
I wait for the sun to stain the clouds
that shade of rattled yellow that announces evening,
the low light, a thing I know but still need to parse.
Read More
I propose we worship the mud dauber
by Jessica Pierce
The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try
and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask
her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world. Read More
The Dog in the Library
by Catherine Stearns
Featured Art: Landscape with Dog by Thomas Doughty
“We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.” —William James
On sunny, cerulean days I go all the way
to eleven when I stretch and sniff among the leaves,
whereas you stay inside, hunched over
your moral universe. Old girl, if you
stopped trying to decipher those fossil bird tracks,
you might see the thermal-gliding hawk above
or that zaftig possum gnawing on fallen
persimmons under the window. I’m just saying
your preference betrays a certain fear
of your own nature. Remember
last summer when you left me in the car
to pick up a book they were holding for you,
and a page or two in you recognized
your own penciled and may I say
obsessive marginalia, although you had
no memory of the text itself?
Whatever made you think your mind
could be disenthralled with words?
As a pup, I once took Mark Strand’s
injunction in “Eating Poetry” to heart,
devouring one or two slim volumes,
but soon realized I prefer the raw
material of life, what e e cummings
calls “the slavver of spring”: smells
of fresh earth, the ghostly scent of
rabbits, even the mounds of dirty laundry
piled up on your bed. If you found answers
to your questions, do you truly believe
those answers would transform you?
So many of your species seem
susceptible to revelation. We’re all
browsers, old girl, without an inkling,
waiting by the door for a treat or to be forgiven
until our unleashed immortal part bolts
for that hit of dopamine. Then
all good dogs go to heaven.
Ekstasis
by Erika Brumett
Featured art: Summer: Cat on a Balustrade by Théophile-Alexandre Pierre Steinlen
“One by one—in convents across medieval Europe—nuns began to believe they were cats.”
–Michael Garerda (Shared Hysteria: Group Madness and the Middle Ages)
Happened after mass
last sabbath. We broke
fast (curdmilk, cabbage),
sat rigid in our hair-
shirts and worship. But heard
then—urgent as prayer
by the dais—a purr-
purring rise from Sister
Mary Iris. Since then, Read More
The Problems of the Wild
by Abby Horowitz
Featured Art: Sleeping Lion and Lioness by Samuel Raven
I am trying to tell Francine about the new babies in my life. They’re lions, baby lions, and they have fur the color of corn flakes and little ears that look straight off a teddy bear and they turn my heart right to butter. But here is the kicker: their mother is dead. Something weird must have happened when she birthed them because a little while later, they found her stretched out in the dirt up front by the viewing glass. The father lion was roaring on his big rock, with his mane standing on end, while the cubs were kneading their paws into the mother lion’s white underbelly and gnawing at her black teats. But no dice, that lioness would roar no more and now things do not look good for those little cubs. Because they’re not taking well to the fake milk they’re getting now or the plastic nipples they’re getting it from, and the father lion keeps pawing around with an evil look on his face that is making the zoo staff nervous. Read More
Octopus on Ecstasy
by Geneviève Paiement
Featured art: from A Picture Book of Practice Sketches by Rinsai Ōkubo
-In September 2018, Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen
published a scientific study wherein she dosed octopuses with MDMA
to see if they would react like humans and become more cuddly. They did.
She hypothesizes that humans are more closely related to octopuses
than we think. Fills a tank with ecstasy. Plunks in us two octopuses.
Just five hundred million years of evolution between us, she muses.
Surely what MDMA does to humans it will do to us octopuses.
Surely we’ll break out in the same cold-sweat/hot-flash, will twist-grind
our visceral humps, bump beaks, squish-entwine our fellow octopus.
Oh wow. I’m at the other’s central axial nerve pump in a house beat,
sucker-to-sucker, lights-out smoke machine to my sister sextapus. Read More
Dune Cat
by Winnie Anderson
Featured Artwork: The Waterfall by Henri Rousseau
Eons ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, the jaguar left his home and traveled across the cold arid grassland: his resolve set. The floods were coming again. If he stayed, the land would either be covered with water or be broken into land pockets, from which there’d be no escape. The time was now. He had to go.
In him the jaguar carried echoes of history, tens of millions of years’ worth of heat spikes, ice ages, tectonic upheavals, and mega-explosions. Time swirled uniquely around him. He felt two trajectories at once—like a stone cast into the deep lake of time, sinking down to the bottom where all life may have begun, as well as the outward rippling cat’s paw upon its surface. History. Present. Future. All there, his for the grappling. Read More
Critical Insect Studies
by Tom Whalen
Featured art: Still Life with Poppy, Insects, and Reptiles by Otto Marseus van Schrieck
One more step and we are out of the circle and have entered the domain, equally delineated and autonomous, of a different species.
—Vladimir Nabokov, “Father’s Butterflies”
My wife departed on the day I began in earnest my Critical Insect Studies. Before this date, I had only jotted down a few thoughts and titles, cut and pasted a few class papers, nothing more, but I was sure, as much as I had ever been sure of anything, basking in my certainty like an oiled blonde in Cannes, that I had found, at age twenty-seven, the subject on whose wings my career would soar from campus to campus, lecture hall to lecture hall around the globe, sometimes Sam coming along, though increasingly, I imagined, taken up with his own concerns. Perhaps we would have had children by then, or new avatars, I didn’t know, or perhaps we would have drifted apart, he wanting nothing to do with me or my fame. Read More
Birds in Cemeteries
by George Kalogeris
It must be the shade that draws them. Or else the grass.
And it seems they always alight away from their flocks,
Alone. It’s so quiet here you can’t help but hear
Their talons clink as they hop from headstone to headstone.
Their sharp, inquisitive beaks cast quizzical glances.
The lawn is mown. The gate is always open.
The names engraved on the stones, and the uplifting words
Below the names, are lapidary as ever.
But almost never even a chirp from the birds,
Let alone a wild shriek, as they perch on a tomb.
And then they fly away, looking as if
They couldn’t remember why it was they came—
But were doing what our souls are supposed to do
On the day we die, if the birds could read the words.
Originally appeared in NOR 11
In the Second Month of Parched Land
by Daiva Markelis
Featured art: Two Camels by John Frederick Lewis
We came across the camels every time we picnicked that merciless autumn, huge herds grazing on sparse vegetation. Camel comes from jamal, the Arabic root word for beauty. From a distance they did look lovely, their curvy silhouettes mimicking the contours of the dunes. Up close, however, they seemed slightly ridiculous, like bad female impersonators, batting their Scarlet O’Hara lashes to keep the sand out of their eyes, their long necks sloping towards us, then coyly withdrawing. Read More
Monarch
by Kathleen Radigan
Featured Art: Abstraction on Concrete by Howard Dearstyne
In the garden I cup a hand
before you, strain my wrist,
willing you to perch.
A nearby woman grips her cane.
“Young lady. If you touch them,
they die.”
Born again from a gauze
coffin, you’re blackwinged,
fragile on a wax leaf. Read More
The Last Litter
by Melissa Cistaro
Featured art: A Farm in Brittany by Paul Gauguin
1975
My mom pours the warmed milk from the stove into oversize plastic bottles, then pops on the giant caramel-colored nipples.
“Do you want to feed one of the little ones down in the calf barn?” she asks.
I cannot contain my smile. My Keds are on in three seconds.
I follow her down the grassy path, holding the warm milk bottles against my chest and trying to copy the sway of her hips. She explains how the calf barn is the holding place for the young Holstein calves who are being weaned from their mothers’ milk.
“Roger likes to wean them young,” she tells me, “so that the mother cows can get back to their job of being milk cows.”
The calves cry and bleat like goats when they see us with the milk bottles. A black-and-white calf shoves his head through the wood slats of the stall and stares up at me with his big polished eyes. I put the rubbery nipple close to his mouth. He grabs and tugs fiercely at the bottle.
“Hold on tight,” my mom says. “That guy is a tough little sucker.”
My calf slurps as he drinks, then yanks at the nipple like he’s mad at it. Milk splatters across his soft black face. When he’s done with the milk he wants to keep chewing and sucking on the rubber tip, but my mom says that will put too much air in his stomach.
“Just stick two fingers in his mouth,” she tells me from across the aisle.
“What?” I say.
She walks over to my calf and sticks her middle and pointer finger right into his mouth. He latches on and starts making sucking sounds.
“There are no teeth in there, just gums,” she says.
I hesitate. I am not certain about this. She grabs my hand and pulls it toward the calf’s mouth. He latches onto my two fingers with such force that I am startled. His mouth is strong and smooth inside. I feel his tongue, like fine sandpaper polishing my fingers. I start to laugh. My mom laughs. I don’t want this to stop. I want to learn as much as I can about living on a farm in case I ever get to live on one. I take my other hand and rub the calf’s face, swirls of
thick black velvet, a perfect white diamond on his forehead.
My mom says she’s got a few chores to do back up at the house, and I ask if I can stay here in the calf barn for a while.
“I like it here,” I tell her.
“I’m glad,” she says. She smiles at me, pushes an unlit cigarette into her mouth and gathers up the empty milk bottles.
My fingers get a little sore from staying in the calf’s mouth so I pull them out. The calf seems okay because after a minute he buckles down on his wobbly legs and flops onto the straw floor. I decide to do a little exploring around the barn. There are dusty bird’s nests tucked all around the rafters and small birds like starlings that swoop down to gather bits of straw from the ground. I find a place to sit in the feed room where there are burlap sacks filled with
cracked corn and molasses-covered oats. I push my hands deep into the open sacks and pull the molasses oats close to my nose. It smells good enough to eat.
I take a walk to the far end of the barn aisle where the calf stalls are empty. There are two tall white buckets with lids on them, the plastic kind that painters use. They look out of place to me for some reason, like maybe they were set down there and forgotten. I pry the lid off the bucket closest to me. There is no particular smell.
I am not sure if what I am seeing is right or true. Kittens. Piled up to the brim. Clean white fur. Brown, black, tan, orange. Small paws with fleshy pads as soft as apricot skin. Wiry tails. Tiny pink noses. Whiskers, as fine as fishing line, almost transparent.
It is not a dream. I push the lid back on. I think there must be more than a dozen piled up in there. I pry open the other bucket only because I want it to be something different. But it’s not. One all black, one striped orange, one smoky gray, more colors underneath. Soft triangle ears, thin as potato chips. I want to stop staring but I can’t. A small calico kitten lies across the top of the heap. Its eyes are closed, but the shallow part of its belly moves—barely, up and down like it’s in a deep sleep. I want to touch it, but I am afraid. I don’t know what to do. I put the lid back on.
I walk back up the hill toward the farmhouse, my heart pounding underneath my yellow T-shirt, the tall wet grass soaking the bottoms of my jeans. When I open the screen door, I see my mom at the table with her New York Times crossword puzzle, her coffee and a cigarette. She’s smart with words. I’m not. I’ve got a throat full of gravel that usually keeps me from saying what I want to say.
But I know what my question is.
“Why are all those kittens in the white buckets?”
She keeps looking down at her crossword puzzle like she’s just about to figure something out. Her dark bangs hang like a frayed curtain across her forehead. For twenty seconds, I don’t even think she’s going to answer my question.
“Oh, that,” she says with a frown. “You weren’t supposed to see that.
Roger was supposed to dump them.”
I wait for her to say something more.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, darlin’. It’s the way of the farm here.”
She smashes the clump of soft ashes down with the filter of her cigarette. There is sparkly pink polish on her fingernails. I hate it when she’s so matter-of-fact.
“There were just too many kittens.”
“What do you mean too many?” I ask.
“Those were feral kittens, wild and inbred—just the ugly ones. Believe me. I can tell the inbred ones right away, their eyes are wide-set and slightly askew. Their heads are oversized.”
“But how did they die?”
My mom gets up from the table with her ceramic coffee cup, and goes into the kitchen. I can tell she doesn’t want to listen to my questions.
“Chloroform is what Roger said to use.”
She measures out a heaping spoonful of sugar into her cup.
“But power steering fluid works just as well. It’s very quick. They don’t suffer.”
I feel my throat tighten up like a fist. My legs are as wobbly and uncertain as the calves down in the barn.
“Mom, I saw one breathing on the top, a calico one, not an ugly one, but a long-haired calico.”
“There were no calicos,” she says, slamming the garbage can lid down. “And, you did not see any kittens breathing.”
“I did, Mom. I definitely saw that one on top.”
“None of those kittens were breathing, you understand?”
I am strangely afraid of her. She knows how much I love kittens. I try to stop the image of her hands pushing those kittens into the white buckets. I know there was a calico. I know that she killed them.
She heads out the screen door, says she’s got to grab a few fresh eggs and she’ll be right back.
I watch her outside the window, walking through the tall grass. I recall what I once overheard her say—that she thought about drugging my brothers and me when we were small because she didn’t want us to suffer. She had an emergency plan in case there was an awful natural disaster. She would give us all sleeping pills. We wouldn’t suffer. But I am almost ten now. I am too big to trick like that.
I wait at the window for her to come back. I wait because I want to feed the calves with her again. I wait because I want to swirl the sugar and cream into her coffee and breathe in her L’Air du Temps perfume. I don’t know when the next time I’ll see her will be. I scratch my fingernail along the thin white paint that covers the window sill. I remind myself that there are things I am not supposed to talk about or remember. I am not supposed to remember the day she drove away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart. Everyone tells me that I was too young to remember. But I remember everything. “Too many,” she said. I know this phrase. I heard her screaming it late one night before she left my brothers and me.
I reach into my jean pockets and I push the secrets in as far as they will go. Between my fingers I roll around a soft piece of gray lint. I don’t want anyone to know that my mom killed those kittens. I push my hands into my pockets even deeper. I make room for the kittens, because they are a new secret.
Originally appeared in NOR 7
Roost
by Janice N. Harrington
Featured Art: Crows in a Tree by Charles François Daubigny
Circling above bare limbs, like Dalí’s wild and articulate capes,
black wings undulate. Raucous hundreds settle and splat
their stench. A murder of crows, a give-a-fuck mob,
stirs the air above ash and oak and hackberry, milling
and loud with news: day heralds, unwelcomed Cassandras.
Dawn light pinched by a crow’s beak, pieces of light falling
everywhere, bright meat that the crow pecks, strips away.
The crows know my neighbor’s face. Knowledgeable birds,
they know the way I hurry each morning, the way my eyes try
to read their dark signs: articulate smoke, curtains
of a confession booth. Blessing? Pardon? Mercy?
The stories say that crows suffer scorched wings, that they
are cursed for stealing from the gods. But the stories, as always, err,
wind-running, wings wide, a-glide on a slide of air,
black bodies, bituminous-black, cosmos-black rising to soar.
There is no damnation in their dizzying speed, the break-wing
improvisations of their flight. God–blessed and black,
their sharp notes strike my skull like hailstones or chunks
of sky, dark bodies that lift my eyes and scorn gravity, a lesser law.
The Good Life
By Susan Allison
The thing about good living
is that it happens, despite
plotting and planning, it happens
contrary to all devices. It happens
when you are renting the only room
you can afford and you somehow
catch the way the light is coming through
the broken dirty windows.
The door is open
and the wind blows in like balm.
It’s warm and you see the colors of the
faded gray frame of the door
against the rust-colored leaves
in the small patch of jungle
down by the alley.
The good life
comes through your eyes
and your ears and your skin,
the way a wild animal comes at you
when it is just curious.
New Ohio Review Issue 27 (Originally printed Spring 2020)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark
By Theresa Burns
Featured Art by Robert Jacob Gordon
And now, instead of staring at the weeds
and broken bottles from the train platform,
we’re taking in a scene from a Monet.
Asters, cosmos, little yellow fists
of something. All random and confetti.
I’m half expecting a lady in a high-waist
dress and bonnet to appear on a diagonal
stroll through its splendor, pausing
with her parasol so we can selfie with her.
Maybe she’ll hop aboard the light rail
to the Amtrak station, get off in D.C.,
step back into the painting she escaped from.
Who was the genius who thought of this?
What meadow-in-a-can Samaritan
got sick of passing the four-acre eyesore
on the way to work? Shook pity into blossom.
To whom do I write my thank you?
Mayor, surveyor, county clerk, church lady.
Who marched down to city hall, begged
anyone who would listen?
Read More
I propose we worship the mud dauber
By Jessica Pierce
Featured Art: by Pieter Holsteyn
The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try
and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask
her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world.
Read More
Wants
By Chris Greenhalgh
I want a punchbag hung in my office and / people to hear the first thump straight
after they leave. / I want you to call me. I want the linctus with / the double action
that both soothes my throat and / brings back memories of a time when I was loved.
/ I want the road below me, the sun above me / and beside me, you. I want to wipe
the legend / “You Will Die” spelled backwards from the bathroom mirror / each
morning as I brush my teeth. I want you / to drive while I change gears. I want my
life story / voiced by William Shatner. I want a belle dame / with plenty of merci.
I want a view of the sea. / I want the future with you and me in it. / I want my
doctor not to have a personalized / number plate. I want my coffee hot, my mattress
/ hard and my maps beautiful rather than useful. / I want small hard bits of chocolate
snapped off. / From mind, I want world. From lips, I want the madness / of kissing.
I want to know where businesses / end and scams begin. I want to confuse salesmen
/ by offering more than the asking price. I want to / stand in an elevator shaft
of rainfall / and look up into the light. I want to know where / you were last night.
I want this confederacy / of selves dismantled and slowly made whole again.
Read More
The Tour
By Erica S. Arkin
It occurred to Dennis six hours into the road trip that he might have made a terrible mistake. His daughter Natalie sat on a fold-down seat in the back of his pickup’s not-so-extended cab, plugged into her Discman and propped against the small window behind the empty passenger seat. She was reading a magazine with a cover that said something about Bedroom Tricks to Blow . . . Dennis only caught a glance when she’d pulled it from her backpack at the last rest area. He was glad he couldn’t see the whole thing in the rearview mirror.
The trip had been her mother’s idea and pitched as a way for Natalie and Dennis to spend some time together. When Hannah called him at the garage a few weeks earlier, she used phrases like “father-daughter road trip” and “genuine bonding.” It might be nice for him to actually get to know his daughter. His ex-wife made a sport out of taking little digs whenever she could.
He balked at first. It was hard enough getting an afternoon off to go to a doctor’s appointment, never mind two whole days to chauffeur Natalie around colleges in Pennsylvania.
“When was the last time you traveled with your daughter?” Hannah had asked. The only trip that came to mind was back when Natalie was ten and Dennis took her to Block Island with his then-girlfriend, Rita. He opened his mouth to mention the trip, but realized it would likely hurt, rather than help, his case. On the last night of the vacation, after Natalie was asleep in the hotel, he and Rita had snuck down to the bar for a nightcap and came back to find an empty room. It was negligent to leave Natalie alone—a fact Dennis realized even before he frantically called the front desk and took to the halls yelling her name. When he finally found her a little over an hour later, she was trying to catch big nocturnal crabs on a spit of beach a quarter mile from the hotel. Flustered, he’d scolded Natalie to the point of tears for wandering off, something he would later realize was his second mistake of the night.
“A trip that hasn’t ended in disaster,” Hannah added. He hated how she could still read his mind.
Squids
By Liz Breazeale
Featured Art: by Nsey Benajah
The first ghost stepped out of the ocean in the summer, shimmering and hazy with captured light. We saw the age in her body, moving as though still burdened by a vast and lonely sea. Her wrinkles like the finest, most fragile spiderwebs we’d ever destroyed.
She came to rest on a foamy lip of shore. Her outline was set and static, her insides swirling, misty, full of translucent opals spun in an ancient hand. We realized later that every ghost was different in texture, but only when we couldn’t count them anymore, when they’d packed themselves across the sand.
Tourists surrounded her, our first ghost, asked where she came from and why. But she didn’t even try to answer. Just planted herself on that sharp beach in Maine and watched the shore birds scuttle and dive.
We spread the video of her like an invasive species, a creature introduced in the most fertile of ecosystems. Amongst ourselves, we debated whether she was a projection or performance art, a trick of the light or a stunt like Holograph Tupac. We asked one another, is she yours? Hoping one of us was the answer, some brilliant marketing ploy, some Don Draper–genius viral advertisement to be jealous of, but knowing under our skin this was something else, something new.
Read More
Watching For You
By Connie Zumpf
Featured Art: by Callie Gibson
You’ve seen it.
That slight shudder of shadow
on the fringe of your vision.
The thing you think you might have seen
while reading Proust at night.
It slips into a crack somewhere.
You search behind the chest of drawers
and underneath the bed. There’s nothing
but a fleeting after breath
of cinnamon and mint.
You think you’ve left the music on.
Humming wafts in from the kitchen
and floorboards creak in 2/4 time
like someone sliding a tango alone.
Following footfalls, muffled steps.
You turn, the sidewalk’s empty—except
for acorns and crackled leaves, strewn
as if awaiting a late-autumn bride.
Dining alone you scan the café,
certain that someone is staring,
but there’s only a waitress checking her watch,
and a man dipping madeleines into his tea.
Then one day, while on your way
to a rendezvous so many times
dismissed, ignored, re-slated—
you spot a figure, somehow familiar,
who waits on a bench by the fountain,
tossing sandwich scraps to the birds
and patiently watching
for you,
biding time as would a beloved
who knows your entire life,
on this day when you come to Death,
who rises to greet you,
smelling of cinnamon (or is it mint?),
arms open to your approach
despite your late arrival.
Read More
Run in such a way that you will obtain it
By Justin Danzy
like Damon did, run clear across the Gulf until the second transplant slows
you, like Dave until the glaucoma sat him down, Janice
ran to the islands to evade it but a hurricane got her, Kim never made it south
of Baltimore, and Anthony, he tried to trick it, changed his name
so it couldn’t find him though it still did, Cordia Jean turned to the bottle
instead of facing it, Beulah stayed put and dared it to come
get her, cost Fred his legs if nothing else, Howard’s eyes went and
it came quick after that, same with Virginia once her mind tapped out,
Mac tried to sue it away but that got him nowhere, P learned to sing to
try to seduce it, Cherry, she just cursed it and called it a day,
Jacques wrote his own Bible and claimed authority over it, Luck served it peach
cobbler as a peace offering, better than Brian, who turned and ran back straight
into it, did it twice actually, he looked it dead in its eye
and charged until running felt like fleeing no longer
Read More
Interrogation Scene
By Allison Elliott
Featured Art: by Edward Penfield
That cat on the corner, drowsy in the arms
of a sleepy-eyed woman. That cat knows something.
You’ve indulged several seasons of vague forecasts,
now you’re playing bad cop with the weather.
A traffic light changes before you’ve finished crossing,
What can that mean? What future portend?
You pass a two-seater buggy with only one baby.
Make a note of it. It might come up later.
The drunk who yells all night under your window
was gone three days, now he’s back.
The Spanish lullaby on the radio,
the eyelash in your lemon tea.
Star witnesses with nothing to tell you.
And they were your whole case.
Read More
What I Meant to Say
By Emily Alexander
friends I am not in love these days I wait
for the bus when it’s cool enough
I bake little treats in muffin tins for fun
I say sea urchin squash blossom
vacuous oh no I’m afraid
I don’t know
what this means and many others the usual
fears plus some uniquely mine balloons popping
in a small room needing immediately
a tooth pulled in a city I’m only visiting strange
coffee shops parking lots
I’m not sure
the rules here maybe these are
usual after all I don’t mean what I say
always what’s the difference these days
before going anywhere I out loud
say phone wallet keys
yesterday I said it and still
forgot all I needed then from the freeway
the ocean right there among everything oh
friends I’m just undone you know
what I mean truth is these days I find myself
occasionally full
of rage other times beer sitting with Halle
on her bedroom floor what’s new
oh man did you hear
about whoever I’m hungry are you
a little flimsy
drunk now the city rumors its width around us
and sometimes over it we just say
very quietly yeah
Read More
How It Ought to Be
By David J. Bauman
Featured Art: by Édouard Manet
When we stepped up into the bus that shuttled us
from car to hospital, she was talking to the man in
the overcoat and fedora. But at the next stop,
he stood up, tipped his hat and clambered down the steps.
Her smile made me think of plums, though barely a brush
of rouge on her cheeks. She wore a heavy, old-woman’s wrap-
around, like a blanket with buttons, tugged about her like a fur
stole. The bus lurched forward, and she turned toward the lady
two seats up. “May I ask where you got that gorgeous shawl?”
“Oh, please don’t,” the other laughed. “It’s very old. They
don’t make them anymore.” The fur-plum lady in her blanket-
coat began to recount how her gran used to wrap her
in a shawl like that, but bigger, “Half the size of a bed sheet!
My grandfather walked behind to help unwrap me when
I got to school.” I whispered in your ear, causing you to giggle.
“Is he misbehaving?” she asked you, like a scolding but
indulgent aunt. She asked us what we’d had for breakfast.
What time was our appointment? Hers were always early.
What were our plans for the holiday? Easter—still two weeks
away. “Well,” she said as she stood up, “if you’re still hungry,
come to my place. I always have plenty left over. “She drew
her massive coat around her and took the steps one at a time.
“Poor soul,” the driver said, and for a moment I wondered,
whose? “She says that kinda stuff to everyone.” He pulled
the lever that closed the door. “She lives alone.” This time, you
whisper to me, and two weeks later, we are standing
on her lawn. You carry the pies. I have the wine. The woman
in the floral shawl holds a casserole, the shuttle bus parked
at the curb. We thought we’d surprise her, but the fur-plum
lady beams like she’s expecting us as she throws the door open,
takes our jackets and hangs them by the others, rows of hats
and wraps, a fedora and an overcoat. She shows us to our seats
at a table impossibly long for her tiny home. Others in white
lab coats are unfolding extra chairs. A doctor with her stethoscope
is lighting the candles. A young man from the hospital café
helps the CEO fill glasses with sparkling water. Other
guests we recognize from shuttle rides and waiting rooms.
The table is draped—I see it now—with that grand, old shawl
of yore, adorned with salads, collard greens, and plums, of course,
scalloped potatoes, and beans of every hue. You’re smiling
like you used to as the oncologists enter with steaming platters,
boats of gravy. And the doorbell just keeps ringing.
Read More
Stolen Hard Drive
By John Moessner
Featured Art from rawpixel.com
It contained home movies where he wore
goggle-sized glasses, a toweled shoulder holding
a small redhead at a birthday party, three hours
of ripped paper like static on a radio, the sun flaring
off the ripples of the neighborhood pool. What do
those thieves think of your soccer games,
the Go girl! and the rain that drove him cursing to the car?
What about last Christmas? He was too tired, so you held the
camera instead and closed in on his drooped head
nodding while everyone opened gifts. Would they tear up
thinking of their fathers, would it convince them to call more?
Ripped from your life, just a plastic box in a bag of stuff.
Maybe before wiping it clean, they will browse your home
movies and say, What a good father, what a good life.
Read More
No, Nothing
By Daryl Jones
Featured Art by Jozef Israëls
He’s in one of his funks again,
my stepmother’s warned me,
hair shaggy and mussed, baggy clothes afloat
on his skinny frame.
My father makes hardly a dent
in the overstuffed sofa he’s sitting on.
No, he’s not hungry.
No, nothing in the paper interests him.
No, there’s nothing I can do
but stare blankly into the distance where he’s staring
as I did sixty years ago when we hunched
shivering and silent on five-gallon buckets
flipped upside down on the ice of Cedar Lake,
waiting for a tiny red plastic flag
to snap to attention.
Now and then, we would stand up stiffly,
huffing and hugging ourselves, stamping our feet,
then skim the slurry from the augured holes
and sit down again, nothing to do but wait,
testing our wills against the deadening cold
and the wily old lunker pike we pictured
in the black, still depths below, impervious
to the booted thunder rumbling overhead,
hunkered down, hovering in its singular darkness,
grim, stubborn, defiant.
Read More
Learning
By Kelly Michels
Featured Art from rawpixel.com
A new cure is invented every day,
along with a new disease
because every miracle needs a disaster
to survive, and there is no shortage
of disaster, the sparrows have learned
to eat anything under the slash-and-burn
of the sun, and the children have learned
how to weave plastic buttercups into bracelets
between the alphabet and spoonfuls of NyQuil
their mothers give them before bed
where they dream of the swish of scar tissue
behind their teacher’s glass eye.
We tell them: There is horror. There is pain.
There are people wedged between bullets
and mud floors, between cracked river ice
and broken elevator shafts. But not here.
Never here.
Now, we sit still as an Eames chair, and the children
will never know the bridge of a song the rain spells
out in the sand on an October morning.
It is safer behind closed doors and windows, safer
where the wheat and ragweed and daisies
can kill no one.
We tell them: We have seen the grim amoeba of lake water,
the blizzard of ocean waves lashing against the curved spine
of coast, the blue-eyed grass raising itself like a rash toward
the swollen ache of sun, the sting of salt, grazing the long arm
of a bluff. We have lived it. We know better now.
We have knelt at the rim of a cliff and looked down.
We have fallen, felt the pulse of the sea pull at our hair
and it was not kind.
Child, put your ear to the conch shell and listen.
This is enough.
Read More
The Pasture Ponds
By John Bargowski
Featured Art by Kieran Osborn
You know the spot, that sharp left
off the county road to Hope
that passes the roadside shrine her
classmates built to our youngest,
the blank stones that mark the old
Presbyterian graveyard,
then on past the last rusted knob
of safety rail
where a graveled lane cuts through
swampy woods.
The pair of wood drake decoys
Hubert anchored to the bottom
riding out every weather on the big pond,
the splotch of white on their sides
that catches in our high beams
as we round the curve.
The twiggy wrack of alder and sumac
clipping the sideviews
as we pass through streaks of moonlight
burnishing the shields
on the skeletoned ruins of our friend’s
red Massey Ferg.
A place we’ve gone to many times
trying to nudge the season ahead,
we crack open the side window, crank
the heater up a couple notches,
sit with the lights clicked shut, side
by side in the front seat,
strain for the first callers crawled free
from March mud, the hyla crucifer,
no bigger than a fingertip, noted in our
dog-eared Peterson’s for shrill voices
that rise then fall, and those dark little crosses
they carry on their backs.
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Tackle
By John Bargowski
Featured Art: by Teerasak Anantanon
Weeks after the cops cut Bill down
and the squad sheeted his body,
bore it out to the street, his mother
leaned over her sill and called us
upstairs to share the flies he’d wrapped
and knotted, labeled
with names we could never
have dreamed up, and arranged
in small wooden boxes next to coils
of tapered leader and packs
of hooks barbed along their shanks,
the button-down shirts
and bank teller suits in his closet
screeched and swayed
on their hangers when she elbowed
her way in for the split bamboo pole
he’d hand-rubbed to a gloss
and mounted with a reel cranked
full of line, nothing we could ever use
when we biked down
to the Hudson piers and bait-fished
for river eels and tommycod,
but we took it all, every piece
of tackle we could carry down
to the stoop to divvy up among us—
his canvas vest, his shoulder bag,
spools of waxed line, the bamboo poles,
his hip waders and creel,
and those boxes of flies—
the Zebra Midge and Gray Ghost,
his Black Woolly Bugger,
Pale Morning Dun.
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Knife and Salt
By Justin Hunt
Featured Art: by Markus Spiske
At sundown, we sit at our garden’s edge,
speak of thinkers and their theories—
what’s real, if something follows
this life, the ways of knowing
the little we know. An owl swoops
the creek below, swift as death. I shift
in my lawn chair, pick at my knee—
an old wound I won’t let heal.
Do you wonder, I ask, if Descartes
ever said, I feel pain, therefore I am?
You sigh, run your eyes to a remnant
of light in the oak above—as if,
in your drift, you could re-enter the time
of our son, inhale his dusky scent.
I honor your silence. But what I feel,
what I know, what I want to say is,
we have no choice but to watch
September settle on our garden.
And look! All these tomatoes
that cling to withered vines—blushes
of green and carmine, waxen wines
and yellows, the swollen heirlooms.
When the next one falls, my love,
I’ll pick it up, fetch us a knife and salt.
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Dear Sister of My Childhood
By Stephanie Rogers
Remember Mom and how she sent us away
to play near the highway ditch, us throwing gravel,
cracking a windshield, an accident. The wronged
woman dragged us by the arms, back
to Mom, who was talking on the phone with Dad,
their separation not quite
official, the whistle of the kettle in the kitchen.
Listen, the woman yelled at Mom
who paid attention then. Your kids banged up
my ride with a rock, and Mom twisted
the phone cord around her wrist, smiled a sorry,
sent us to our bedroom where we blanketed
the stuffed animals, planned a fantasy
ship trip, and swung them over
the green carpet ocean till a rabbit flew off
and drowned, the kittens and bears unaware
of their fallen friend. What the hell?
We were fun kids, placing our heads
on Dad’s chest, listening for his heartbeat,
our faces like mother
birds covering the nest. We licked
our plates clean when told, laughed at the old
dog dragging its ass across the rug, salted up
those outdoor slugs that vanished
into mush. Dear sister, visit me now.
New York City stays
windy all year, the crowds shouting
their snare-drum quips at one another,
the summer sweaty as beach shells, Dad dead
from a rip in the intestine, Mom’s boyfriend gone
on the vodka binge, and all my life spent rounding
corners like a whirlwind, my smoke
settling now. But here I am, still
broke and meddling in your Nashville life,
your three girls sweet as key lime pie
smashed in the face, their tresses: long
and swaying down their backs the way honey
slips softly from the spoon. Let’s crescendo
under the moon together with our banter,
tempers under the weather
for once, us in love with our stupid boyfriends,
giddy as a cow
Chip’s Laundromat
By Stephanie Rogers
We walk in on Thanksgiving, trash bags filled with clothes
slung over our shoulders. Heather insists I break
a twenty at McDonald’s. I buy a dollar cheeseburger, eat it
as the cashier counts out the nineteen dollars’ worth
of quarters. No one else is there. Neither of us
bothers to separate
the whites from colors or obey
the posted sign that says we shouldn’t
sit on top of the washers. So, we lie
back, discuss the different shapes
the ceiling stains resemble: a butterfly, atomic
bomb explosion, ruffled
curtain, deep red
crayon melting down the wall. We don’t want to go home.
Three streets over, our parents wash the dishes, hit
their joint again, and pack the leftovers
away, while their two daughters hope
the dryers won’t really dry the clothes
in fifty minutes. We drag them out. Heather insists
we fold the underwear.
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American Horror
By Jessica Alexander
You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so
full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red,
to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and
the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like
a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went
braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is
that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take
one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling
they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that
played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my
top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about
blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American.
So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde
girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or
James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts,
that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart
into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium
again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless
in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window
breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The
sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw
my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what
happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.
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The Worst Thing Ever Done to Me
By Rodney Jones
I was four,
playing on the front porch.
Early spring.
The mimosa was in bloom.
Eisenhower was in the White House.
Usually when I played, I became a car,
the noises of the engine,
the clutch, and the tires
scorching around corners.
Or my body was a car—my mind drove.
Twilight, a little before supper.
My father, just home from work,
was talking with a neighbor—
a bachelor cousin,
a farmer and minister.
A beautiful little knot
nearly everyone treated like a saint
for the fervor of his prayers
and his epic sermons
on the black children of Cain.
Do not suppose I am not grateful
the worst thing ever done to me
did not involve boiling water,
electricity, bullwhip, pliers,
starvation, pruning shears, ax,
chain, blackmail, blowjob, or rope.
I was not doped or blown up. I
was not snuffed in a hole.
For the crime of interrupting
a conversation about guano
by mimicking the noise
of an old car backfiring,
I was lifted by the ears
and swung like a pig.
Tilt-A-Whirl
By Nancy Miller Gomez
Featured Art: by Scott Webb
It was a hot day in Paola, Kansas.
The rides were banging around empty
as we moved through the carnival music and catcalls.
At the Tilt-A-Whirl we were the only ones.
My big sister chose our carriage carefully,
walking a full circle until she stopped.
The ride operator didn’t take his eyes off her
long dark hair and amber eyes, ringed
like the golden interior of a newly felled pine.
She didn’t seem to notice him lingering
as he checked the lap bar and my sister asked
in her sweetest, most innocent—or maybe
not-so-innocent—voice, Can we have a long ride please,
mister? When he sat back down
at the joystick, he made a show
of lighting his smoke and the cage
of his face settled into a smile
I would one day learn to recognize.
Here was a man who knew
his life would never get better,
and those dizzying red teacups began to spin
my sister and me into woozy amusement.
Guts
By Jamie Danielle Logan
She stirs with the movement of the sun. Dawn stretches over the horizon, and she searches for motion amid the brush. Her world appears in shades of gray, with bursts of blue and violet. She cannot see the orange of my vest or the green-brown pattern on my coat, but she can smell my breath in the air. She startles, bounding once, twice, before the breeze decides her fate. It shifts and she pauses next to the lone pine tree, the one that is seventy yards from my small wooden stand. She has just lost the spots of fawnhood. I pull the trigger.
The hunt is humane, my uncle tells me. The population of white-tailed deer in Mississippi is estimated at 1.75 million. It is the highest density in the nation, and only Texas has more deer. In some areas, the herd is still above capacity. A study done in Wisconsin revealed that starvation, non-human predators, and vehicle collision are the top three causes of death for deer, afterhuman hunting. Of these three, none are painless. A bullet to the heart is.
I was sixteen when my uncle first built a deer stand on family land. Deer had begun to appear on our property with increasing frequency. An outdoorsman, he eagerly anticipated teaching his three children this new skill. He convinced my father, his younger brother, to join him. It was decided. My cousins, my brother, and I would learn to hunt. My uncle taught us how to shoot in the summer when the earth was green. We aimed for slabs of cardboard, our mantra ringing louder than the echo of the gun. If it’s brown, it’s down, we said. We did not think of race when we said it, just of victory.
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Bayou Newlyweds
By Rome Hernández Morgan
Featured Art: by David Hockney
Evenings, we hold hands
and take long walks
through the neighborhood
as the sweet and sickly smells
of the chemical toilet plant
crystallize into greenish glowing stars.
We live a stone’s throw
from the nicest part of town
and we do—throw stones
that is—skipping them
over flooded ditches
on the way to the laundromat.
Our little home is dark,
iron bars cross the windows,
and no matter how I sweep
or mop, swamp mud
holds tight to the linoleum.
When we argue
I plan fire escape routes.
I imagine kicking out
the A/C unit, climbing down
the cinderblock wall.
Sometimes we visit your mother
who serves us stuffed flounder
with remoulade sauce.
Fish emerge from the freezer,
their pale faces
surprised to see the uncovered
chicken breast frozen
to the shelf and ever shall be
world without end. That unbearable
pink heat of the kitchen
—we escape to the patio,
watch cockroaches pilot haphazardly
from tree to tree. Your mother
drinks in cigarette smoke
and white wine and wants to know
about our sex life. I wince
at the salt-sharpened fish, the ashen fins.
Fireworks: Albuquerque
By Kate Fetherston
Featured Art from rawpixel.com
Summer evenings on our street, the dads nursed
warm cans of Hamm’s, exchanging a syllable now
and then, casually supervising us kids setting off cherry
bombs or Stinky Snakes, while the moms appeared in lit
doorways as they swiped bugs with a wet
dishtowel, a baby slung on a shoulder, and yelled or
begged for some one of us to stop
hitting our brothers or to let our sisters play, then disappeared
behind kitchen curtains into a foreign
country. We kids thought we knew
everything worth knowing: that the dads spent
midnights banging things around in the garage, or
leaning against a Chevy half-ton on blocks in the front
yard, smoking and killing time until the moms put us to bed
or until moonrise enticed them to laugh and curl
into the dads’ arms long after we were supposed
to be asleep. Those warm lingering dusks the dads lounged
on sidewalks like lions staking out their savannah, eyes
on us but not on us. We ran into the street trailing
sparklers, whooshing our arms like Ferris wheels
in the same motion our dads’ fists
made circles that crushed hissing
empties. When Mr. H let slip between
swigs, that Mrs. H was so clumsy she
broke her arm falling through the living room
window, the other dads, suddenly quiet, squinted
at stars popping out and spat into the gutter. Conjured
from nowhere and all business, the moms, with one
swift stroke of Bisquick-dusted arms, whisked
us eavesdroppers back into the street where
we twirled into the coming night, our sparklers shooting
fire we thought would save us. We flew
and flew and flopped on the still
warm asphalt, until a dust devil of moths beat
against porchlights flickering
on, one by one. Those fluttering
deaths meant nothing to us.
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Lap Dance with No Ending
By Kathleen Balma
There’s a bouncer in this poem, watching
you read it. His name is Vic. Vic won’t make
eye contact, won’t bug you unless I signal
distress. I’ve never had to do that in poetry
yet. He was in the army. Discreet as a landmine.
As long as you keep still and do nothing
while I work, he won’t interrupt this lit
experience. Vic may or may not have killed.
He may or may not use meth. He does work out.
He does know my routine. He’s seen me do it
dozens of nights. He knows all the words
to the money songs. His peripheral vision
is muscular. It sees every crook and swerve
of me, though he and I don’t speak and I
have never touched him. It’s crucial that you
fear him while my naked’s in your face.
Only sometimes you need more. The dog
tags looped through my shoe strap, those
aren’t Vic’s. I can defuse a bomb with my teeth.
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Photo of Betty at Mass Ave and Third
By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Art: by Auguste Rodin
We were happy, it’s true.
She had this zippy, kind of dithery inner gladness
and made a joke out of posing, hip-slung,
hands in the air, she had that pink top on.
Years later by the window near the stove
I watched her leaving in her blue Ford.
I made a drink and turned the TV down.
I opened the fridge and let it shut
then lay on the couch feet up
and watched our maple sway,
confiding, conspiratorial.
It was autumn.
It was early and as a taxi passed
I could hear the neighbor’s children
on their way to school.
I could see them shouting and shoving,
someone running ahead and I thought how easy
their lives must be, what a heaven of unconstraint.
It’s hard to know how to stand,
hard to know when to smile or when to be serious.
She had that zippy, kind of dithery inner gladness
and made a joke out of posing.
I’m different now.
She lives out east I think.
She had that pink top on.
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When the Doctor Calls After the Final Round of IVF
By Josephine Yu
It’s a good thing he caught you on the threshold
of Publix, so you can cross into
that tiled acreage of plenty.
When you’re pushing a cart with a temperamental
wheel, you won’t cry. When you’re putting
chicken salad with tarragon and almonds
into the cart, you won’t weep, and choosing
a tray of ground chuck, plump under Saran Wrap,
you won’t howl.
Stacking cups of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt
into the cart, you wouldn’t dream
of collapsing on the tiles in a spectacular
Old Testament hair-pulling fit—not there
before the stoicism of buttermilk,
the solemn dignity of Greek yogurt.
As you reach into the frozen food case, hand above
a bag of mixed vegetables, an old voice
appears in your head, as clear
as the piped-in Billy Joel, that familiar voice
insisting calmly, I told you
you were worthless, didn’t I?
You and your moldy rat turd eggs that will never
make a living thing, and you wait, numb
in the artificial cold, and let that voice say
the truth it has to say with its smug authority,
and then lay the bag of peas, carrots, and lima beans
on the metal seat where the infant would sit.
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When a Friend Writes of Her Pregnancy
By Josephine Yu
Heft up the door of the storage unit
where you sequestered the baby
things after the second miscarriage.
Board books, plush animals,
clothes sorted in file boxes
like evidence in a cold case. Kneel there
on the concrete floor. Choose a gift
to send her—act of penance
for the low sob that groaned
from your chest like the cry
of some prehistoric flightless bird.
Penance for the bad math that clacks
its abacus beads: one infant plus
one infant equals zero infants.
Fold footie pajamas in tissue,
as if relayering an onion. Scrape
curling ribbon with a scissor blade
until grief sloughs off
like charred skin debrided. This,
this is your feat of strength,
a woman lifting a car
off a toddler.
That terrified. That furious.
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Layover
By Caitlin Cowan
Featured Art: by Serzill Hasan
There was a mechanical bull and a waitress
who flirted with everyone. There was a rainbow
of cocktails served lukewarm in pint glasses,
two fingers of dread. We’d missed a flight
in bad weather but had been offered another.
There was only one seat. He wanted me
to get on, but I said no—wouldn’t leave him.
Interred at a dark sports bar, we ended
the night eating wings cruelly torn
from an Atlanta–area buffalo. He watched
five games at once—linebackers creaming each other
in snow—and nothing was enough. Outside
I dialed a friend, asked her Is it weird he wanted me
to leave without him? At the airport hotel
he laid his head on the sticky desk
in front of the mirror, defeated.
He was beside himself—
one version quite literally slumping
next to the other, and only one of them still
my husband. My eyes hurt from the obvious
overhead lighting. I asked him if he was okay
until I felt insane. We never know
how long we’ll have to rest,
how long we’ll nap in the terminal
of not good enough before we run,
out of breath, to board something better—
I wouldn’t recognize myself
for years, had so far to go until
I could become a woman I’d want to know.
That night, there were gas station 40s and Cheetos.
There may have been pay-per-view porn.
Back home in Texas, Jolene may have been waiting
for his return: I couldn’t hurry my knowing.
It was Christmas. When I opened
his gift, he whispered next year
and better. But there was no next year,
no better.
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