Author: newohioreviewonlineissues
Language Immersion
By Jeff Walker
Featured Art: by Martin Johnson Heade
Nobody, speaking of fluency, would remember
that party where I told the young woman
seated on the floor: this food tastes good. Nothing untoward.
She surprised me by crawling on all fours, her blouse fairly open
at the top by way of happy gravity, to gently
take the food from my hand with her teeth; alarmed me
because I was not young and
what could she be thinking by doing that?
Around us on sofas and out under the trees hummed
the language I would not understand after years of trying
and also of trying to understand why I couldn’t,
an easy-to-employ tongue with few options and simple
structure but when they speak to each other it’s unintelligible,
a giggle-babble, a bubbly stream of what I guess are words,
vain emptying of thought from one head to another,
like all language, really.
Why not give it up and run silent miles
through the mud and rice paddies with my jogging buddies,
or ride miles on a motorbike alongside a mute, jiggling citizenry,
my face contained and content behind its polycarbonate shield,
my mouth behind its filter mask, and who on the back
not speaking, only chewing?
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Return
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Mary Gaitskill
By Analía Villagra
He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.
She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.
“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.
Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.
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The Blackbird Whistling
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: by John Frederick Kensett
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
—Wallace Stevens
1. The Beauty of Innuendoes
Meaning in poems comes and goes
like a car speeding down a tree-lined road
sun-shade-sun-shade-sun-shade . . .
Poems’ secret places:
fleeting, hidden, close.
Closer yet I approach you, Whitman warmly says;
and then,
We understand, then, do we not?—never saying
what it is
we understand. As I understand a poem
by my friend
but mustn’t tell him
what about the poem makes me feel so
not alone.
2. The Beauty of Inflections
Yesterday I called my friend.
He was in a peaceful mood
(which he would be the first to say is kind of rare).
As if bubbles of CO2 some clams or scallops had exhaled
were calmly rising
in a steady/wavering
surface-seeking
kind of way
up through his contentment
effortlessly rose some words of praise for me. Plain
and unadorned; clear; direct.
The blackbird whistling,
you might say.
In fact,
if my friends didn’t tell me plainly that they
love me
sometimes,
I wouldn’t understand a single thing
I try to read at all.
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Trees in March
By Linda Bamber
We were seated near the back of the Chinese restaurant, and waiters were
rushing in and out of the swinging doors to the kitchen. At the time we had
not as yet so much as brushed shoulders. Resting on the formica table top, my
hand began to feel odd. Not bad-odd; but most unusual. Trees in early March,
aroused, their branches slightly reddened by the slightly stronger sun, may feel
something similar. They have a new sense of their importance in the scheme of
things; they remember (if I may say so) they are divine. He was looking at my
face, not my hand, so I don’t know how my hand, resting near the remains of
the General Gau’s chicken, intuited its sudden access of significance; but it did.
It had aura you could cut with a knife.
Shortly thereafter he took my hand.
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Mango Languages
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: by Winslow Homer
—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.
¡Tu hermano se parece más a tu abuelito que a ti!
(Your brother looks more like your grandpa than you!)
People there are not tortured by thoughts of what they should have done to
prevent this; they do not endlessly analyze the causes of the disaster; or notice
how many of their friends are independently coming up with the metaphor of
a tsunami wiping away what is precious from the past and has been defended
by their devoted work.
No llame a la policía. No es una emergencia.
(Do not call the police. It’s not an emergency.)
In that world they do not sit glumly when friends excitedly tell of recent
protest marches; they are not thinking, “Great, feel inspired; meanwhile,
they’ve got all three branches of government.”
¡Me encantaría que me dejaras accompañarte a la esta de Pablo!
(I would love it if you would let me accompany you to Pablo’s party!)
People there are not suddenly crossing the border into Canada in the snow
with children in their arms; or trooping out of Jewish Community Centers on
a Tuesday because of death threats; or writing emergency numbers on their
children’s forearms in indelible ink in case Mamacita doesn’t come home from
work that day.
Every morning I cross the border into Mango Languages, my ticket to
oblivion. “Loading your adventure,” says my computer when I boot it up.
Every ten minutes a woman’s joyful voice says, “Isn’t this easy?” to encourage
me, and I admit I feel encouraged.
Córtalos en pedacitos y échalos al agua que está hirviendo.
(Cut them in little pieces and throw them in boiling water.)
They are speaking of nothing more precious than carrots and onions; not,
for example, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We are learning to use the
imperative mood, that’s all; and today we are making soup.
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Near the Campo Aponal, on My Father’s Birthday
By David Brendan Hopes
Featured Art: A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards
De Sandro’s café with the orange tablecloths
wades into the one stone street
without tourists, all the Venetians pushing
their big delivery carts at first of morning.
From what I understand of it,
the shouting is voluble,
happy, glad to be alive, almost never
without reference to anatomy.
Nine years after your death it is still your birthday.
I’m treating you to cappuccino and showing off
my lacework of Italian.
Ecco, I cry, pointing to the beautiful faces,
the beautiful things.
Everything was outlandish to you. Nothing is to me.
In that way balance is achieved across the long years.
But I think you would like these people.
They would pull out the orange chairs, sit down,
listen to what you have to say. You would be old
and wise in a city old and wise, and that would be
enough.
I’d better think of something else before the mood
turns heavy and hard to carry over the Rialto Bridge
with the shops just opening.
All those selfie-taking children,
all that brightness bearing down.
Happy birthday, I want to say,
from the last place on earth, where the earth dissolves
and the crazy towers lean out over
watching for what comes—sinuous, flowing,
unexpected—next.
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Of Seeing, the Unseen, and the Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and “When It Rains in Gaza”
by: Philip Metres
1. I Tap My Cell to See
In the beginning, I did not see but heard: news over the radio about the bombing of Gaza in 2014, triggered by a whole series of events—we say “triggered,” as if history itself were a weapon ready to be fired. Voices untranslated, the tone of panic rising, sometimes breaking into anguished cries, the wail of air raid sirens, and the smooth voiceover of journalists, trying to tuck the adrenaline beneath the language, trying to strike a tone that seems fair and balanced.
On Language, Bombs, and Other Things That Exist
by: Kimberly Grey
As poets, we often assemble language to disassemble meaning—or we disassemble language to assemble meaning—and this is all an effort to translate the ordinary (a pair of socks, the name of that place, subway car, chair versus shadow, the front of a sparrow, something afloat like a naked rock) into an extraordinary textual or speech act. The result, we hope, is something new and transformative.
The Technology of the American Sonnet
by: Brian Brodeur
If a poem, as William Carlos Williams claimed, is a machine made out of words, the sonnet can be viewed as a particularly compressed, dynamic, and efficient little gizmo, one that poets have been tinkering with since the 12th century. These tinkerers, of course, have included some of the most foundational poets of Western literature—from Dante and Petrarch through Hopkins and Frost—all of whom have used one variation or another to perform what Phillis Levin classifies as “a mode of introspection, a crystallization of the process of thought.”
The Transitional Voice: Exploring Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting”
by: Claire Bateman
There are currently three kinds of human in the world: the non-digital; digital natives; and adapters who have learned to communicate digitally but still remember an analog society though they cannot fully access that prior consciousness, just as no adult can fully access their sense of self prior to their awareness of death and sex. Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting” speaks in the voice of the third kind of human, a member of this historically unique transitional species, embodying a before-and-after in our culture in which babies swipe insouciantly on screens almost before they can sit up on their own. Interestingly, rather than relegating texting to the status of object, Ramsey personifies it as a shapeshifting subject she addresses in order to explore the range and complexity of an adapter’s experience. Consider how she opens the poem:
Machines, Mortality, and the Lyric Poem
by: Bethany Schultz Hurst
After my mother died, I kept reaching for my phone. I’d talked to her almost daily during the last years of her illness, when she’d been mostly housebound, watching Hallmark movies and BBC mysteries alongside my patient father and an ever-present small plate of toast she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Because I couldn’t reach her now, I found myself instead playing the matching game I’d downloaded in case I needed to occupy my young son on the flight back to Denver for the funeral. For brief periods, the game let me put my grief in the background and focus on the simple task of matching little clusters of fruit or flowers to earn points toward restoring a cartoon estate garden that had fallen into disrepair. The game offered order and arrangement, a small sense of accomplishment when other tasks (or even former pleasures, like reading) seemed to demand too much concentration.
Of the People, for the People, by the Robots
by Christopher A. Sims
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.
Take Me to Your Lady Leader
by Kristen Lillvis
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.
"This Time I'm Going to Fool Somebody": Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation
by Dustin Faulstick
“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.
Villainous Villanelle
by: Denise Duhamel
My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience,
my ego, Miss Goody Two Shoes.
Her neon pink laces make him nauseous.
On Being Asked to Contribute to the Villains Feature
by: Richard Cecil
I searched ten years of word files
looking for titles with names of politicians who
enrich the rich while trampling down the poor
and corporate criminal CEOs who screw
employees out of wages, rape the Earth,
and hide their stolen billions far offshore,
and drew a blank. I also found a dearth
of killer clowns and warlords steeped in gore,
religious rabble rousers, nasty nuns,
child-abusing Catholic priests—zero.
No bought congressmen who vote pro-gun;
no homicidal patriotic heroes.
What’s blinded me to monsters all those years?
The Frankenstein inside. It’s him I fear.
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Designs Less Palpable: Emotional Manipulation and Even-Handedness in Keats
by: Matthew VanWinkle
In a February 3, 1818 letter to his friend Reynolds, Keats rejects a reading experience that he associates primarily with Wordsworth: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” The reproach is so scathing because it acutely observes how rapidly the poetry’s interest in its audience cools, from the importunate heat of the design to the indifferent withdrawal to the pocket. Keats is fuming primarily at Wordsworth’s dogmatism and propensity for self-congratulation, as we hear earlier in the letter, where Keats complains of being “bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.”
Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity
by: C.L. Dallat
When W.B. Yeats dismissed Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry as “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (and omitted Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg from his 1936 anthology), he was making a powerful statement, not just about distaste for sentimental language and the role of pity in poetry, but about the poet’s duties and limits. He had already excluded writing war poetry from his own list of obligations in 1915’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” but only later became more coherent on the abjuration of pity as an unfit subject.
Tell It Cool: On Writing with Restraint
By: Debra Marquart
For years, I’ve encouraged students to “tell it cool” when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I’ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place where Hemingway said it, I can’t put my finger on the quote. I know it’s in there somewhere, likely in one of the letters (bossy letters full of unsolicited advice and signed “Papa” when friends were just writing to ask for money).
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway famously wrote about knowing what to leave out. In his discussion of the short story, “Out of Season,” for example, he remarks that he left out a key event connected to the real story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.” According to a letter that Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, the story was “an almost literal transcription” of an experience he’d had while traveling in Europe with his first wife, Hadley.
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I Second That Emotion
by: Rebecca McClanahan
A few years ago, I attended a literary gathering and heard four poets and memoirists read from their work. They were all accomplished writers, varied enough in their approaches to evoke laughter, sighs, nods of acknowledgment, a collective gasp at one point, and, toward the end of the evening, some tears as well. Tears are not uncommon at readings, of course—I have cried at several—but in this case the tears came not from audience members but rather from one of the readers, who had warned us that she might “choke up” because of the emotional content of the autobiographical piece she was about to read. Her introduction, followed by a tearful presentation, suggested either that the work was too new to share publicly or that she had planned her reaction and was intentionally manipulating us. As she spoke, I sensed listeners growing more and more uncomfortable, as I was. Some leaned back into their chairs, some crossed their arms. The more emotional the reader’s performance became, the less effect it seemed to have, an unfortunate outcome, especially given that the work was potentially moving in and of itself. But it was as if the writer did not trust the work, or perhaps did not trust us to do our job as listeners: to bring our own emotional response to the work.
Staying with Argos: Odysseus and His Dog
by: AJ Aronstein
Argos, the loyal dog of long-suffering, well-tanned, always-oiled Odysseus, appears only once in The Odyssey. At the sight of Odysseus, who returns to the island kingdom Ithaca after 20 years, Argos dies. Bam! Kaput. Struck down by a Zeusian thunderbolt. At this point in Book 17, no one other than the reader knows the true identity of the disguised and smelly Odysseus, who dresses like a beggar. Escorted by his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus pauses to observe Argos from the distance of a few steps. But he can’t even pet the pup before steering back toward his wife’s suitors, whom he’ll slaughter in due course. Argos dies almost immediately after Odysseus turns away. Though the encounter takes fewer than one hundred lines, its brevity should not trick us into thinking about Argos’s death as a merely sad aside. A closer reading reveals how Homer manipulates his audience before the final act, using Argos to orient our empathy toward Odysseus. Moreover, if we stay with Argos a little longer, he reveals something essential about fiction’s capacity to wrap epic emotions into even the tiniest moments.
On Lauren Groff's “L. DeBard and Aliette”
by: Caitlin Horrocks
I originally read this story in the 2006 Summer Fiction Issue of The Atlantic, a magazine whose student writing contest I had won the previous winter. I was wandering the aisles of a grocery store in a strange city, where my boyfriend had just abandoned me to run an errand to an ex-girlfriend’s house. I perused the magazine rack, scanned the table of contents of The Atlantic. My winning story had been considered for publication, but had not made the cut. The famous authors listed I could forgive for bumping me, on grounds of their fame. But who was this “Lauren Groff”? I’d never heard of her. A newbie, like me. Surely, she was the one who had taken my spot.
New Ohio Review Issue 23. Originally printed Spring 2018.
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 23 compiled by Darby Ricks
Midnight at the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company
By Sandy Gingras
Featured Art: Position Interplay: Midnight by Samia Halaby
The building is boarded up, but we know how to get in.
It’s the end of summer and we’re seventeen. We don’t have a car
and there’s nowhere to go in this town except down
the huge hills gliding our bikes past the A&P,
the Ben Sun store where my mother buys my gym uniform, past
the funeral home and the corner bar where Eddie’s father sits
in the same chair every afternoon. The air is humid,
and the stars look stalled out in the sky. Maybe they’re waiting
for us to try something or to grow up already like my mother tells
me to do. A train goes past and faces stare out of the fluorescent lights.
My flip-flops ring on the metal stairs. Eddie puts his shoulder on
a board, and we’re through. It’s just the way it always is—
the way they left it. Eddie sweeps his flashlight across
the cables and cogs and steel beams, the stacks of papers
next to the stapler. This place is leaking
PCPs into the Hudson River, my mother says, but we don’t know
what PCPs are. All I know is, this is where my father worked
before he left my mother. Eddie and I grew up two brick houses
away from each other. Tonight we’re here to take one last look at
the muscley machines. I’m leaving for school tomorrow.
See, some things last, Eddie says to me. I don’t tell him different.
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Los Angeles, 1990
By Jerry Williams
Featured Art: Motorcycle Race (Motorradrennen) by Oskar Nerlinger
I can recall riding a Kawasaki 750
down Sunset Boulevard
on a Saturday afternoon in light traffic.
Cruising along at thirty mph in fourth gear,
I let go of the handlebars,
braced myself on the fuel tank,
and slowly rose to my feet.
Helmetless, I stood like a surfer in the wind
on the imitation leather seat,
my longish hair blown back,
sunshine bursting through my goggles.
A thin membrane of fear lined
the inside of an urn made of pure joy.
After about an eighth of a mile,
I returned to the legal sitting position
and only then did I notice my runaway pulse.
When you’re twenty-three years old
the saddle of a thousand-pound motorcycle
feels as firm as the ground you walk on.
You get full access to your inner maniac.
Nowadays, doctors and sounder reasoning
have rescued me from worldly vices
and a rapid heartbeat often provokes alarm.
But I miss the brash torque of myself,
the quality of light in that urban desert,
all the midnights and years out in front of me
like the beautiful stupid jewels of infinity.
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May My Enemy Be Overcome By His Own Glitter
By Laura Paul Watson
Featured Art: Glittering the Being by Roberto Matta
May he wake to an empty house.
May every pleasure
be interrupted. May every wheel squeak.
When he reaches the front of the line
may he return to the end of it
and may everyone before him
pay by personal check.
May he receive a thousand e-mails a day,
none of them personal, every one of them personal.
May he go nowhere in metaphor
but travel everywhere by bus.
May every road be under construction.
May he lose the last page of every book.
May he find no pillow in the field.
May he find no field.
When faced with stone, may he see only stone.
Because he is narrow, may he hold
no one but himself.
There is power in forgiveness.
There is power in withholding it.
May he have the life he wished for me.
May every way be the dark way home.
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Google Map
By Connie Zumpf
Featured Art: The House on the Edge of the Village by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen
Today I Googlemapped your address
hoping to catch a glimpse of you.
You weren’t in the picture,
but must have been home because
your truck sat in the driveway.
It all looked calm and still—I was glad
to see the grass had been mowed
and the weeds kept at bay. I rotated
the street view to the little park
just north of your house, the one
where we walked through withered leaves
last November. You weren’t there either.
Of course I know that’s not how it works;
the satellite photo was snapped a few
years ago, a scene from your life that may
no longer be true, a moment
just now opened for me, but long ago
over for you. It’s like staring up
at the Orion Nebula at night,
its light carrying sparks of cosmic news
from 1500 years ago. Here on Earth,
the Roman Empire was crumbling
and Arthur reigned as Britain’s king,
if he ever existed at all. We only know
outer space as it was, just as I can only
measure distance and time
from the us I knew
to who we’ve become. And now
I sit in front of my window
like a God-eye peering in
on your life, hoping
to catch you from a satellite view
at some yesterday-moment
when you were nowhere in sight.
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Strangers I Think I Know
By Connie Zumpf
Featured Art: The Siesta by Paul Gauguin
A woman steps off a bus or a train,
and something about her—
the way she holds her shoulders,
that straight-on walk—
swings my head around.
I am here, not over there. But maybe
there’s an occasional breach
where the skin of time thins,
and I glimpse unlived versions
of myself on a crowded street,
or through bookshelves in a library.
Where do lives go
when they peel off in parallel?
I could be the ghost of a small girl
who drowned, now hovering
like an imp over her mother’s life.
Or a woman married, now forty years,
a circle of pale skin under her ring,
eyes dimmed from years
of looking away—
some might-have-been me is a doctor
who teaches psychology and practices
Tai Chi alone on the beach.
Or is this an alternate life I’m in—
my real self’s hologram,
crept in under the tent flap while
embodied me pulls tankards of ale
in a pub in Dublin, relieved
she left Denver and loving her life
as an expat part-time bartender?
Roland Raccoon
By Karin Lin-Greenberg
Featured Art: Girl by Egon Schiele
Ms. Gardner had not been in support of the plan to drag Roland Raccoon to every middle school science class, but the principal said they’d paid Margery Martin a flat fee for the school visit, and it would be a waste if every student at Grisham Middle School did not have the opportunity to visit with Roland. Ms. Gardner was certain the eighth graders in her sixth period class were too old to learn life lessons about kindness and compassion and giving everyone and everything a chance from a twelve-year-old blind raccoon that was also deaf in one ear. “But he loves to be sung to,” Margery Martin had informed the class, adding, “in his good ear.” She cradled Roland in her lap as if he were a baby.
Margery leaned down, put her lips unsavorily close to Roland’s ear, and sang something that might have been Frank Sinatra. The boys who were sitting against a bookshelf near the rear of the classroom, as far away from Margery as they were allowed, snickered, and Ms. Gardner heard the word “rabies” whispered several times. Margery was in her seventies, wore a baggy sweatshirt with a large cartoon raccoon’s face on it, pink elastic-waist pants, and thick-soled orthopedic shoes. Perhaps the fifth graders might find something charming in her, might think she was similar in some way to their beloved grandmothers, but the eighth graders were surely too jaded to believe that spending an hour sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounding a woman crooning to a raccoon splayed on her lap was a good use of their time. There were twenty-four of them in a semi-circle on the floor. Well, twenty-three of them cross-legged on the ground and then Julia Fredericks in a wheelchair. During the summer, she’d been in a boating accident when she’d gone to visit her cousins on Long Island, and her legs had been crushed. Doctors were unsure if she would walk again. Some of the girls in the class treated Julia as if she were their wounded pet, making sure to follow her everywhere, offering to help her at all times, even when it was clear that she did not need help. These girls were well-intentioned, even though they were mostly unhelpful and in Julia’s way. Julia had been remarkably patient with the girls fussing over her, and Ms. Gardner had thought of nominating Julia for Eighth Grade Student of the Year for this patience and for her resilience in the face of adversity, but she was afraid others would believe Julia’s nomination (and likely win) to be the result of teachers feeling sorry for her.
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Not the Wolf but the Dog
By Jacqueline Berger
Featured Art: Two Human Beings. The Lovely Ones by Edvard Munch
Not the zebra but the horse;
not buffalo but cows,
maybe camels,
who traded the wild for the stable,
a stall lined in straw,
the house with wee gables and eaves,
their name over the door—
Biscuit, Coco. Snowball, Ranger.
Traded the hunt for the daily bowl and dish,
predators for owners, collar and leash;
agreed to be a tool—plow or cart
or confidant—to breed in captivity.
So when the man in the elevator
at the Venetian holding his cardboard
tray of coffees and muffins
heading back to his room
says to no one in particular,
but most likely to the other man,
the three of us strangers,
I better get something in return for this,
he means fetching breakfast
so his wife can sleep,
I better get something for all of this,
gesturing with his head,
meaning the hotel, the dinners and shows,
I think about women
who prowl the midnight streets
in their staggering heels,
breasts like missiles
because they’d rather be feral than kept.
And about men who gave up
wilding to name their offspring,
their known code continuing on forever.
I’m carrying my own tray
of coffees and muffins,
will soon press the card against the lock,
open the room, rip off my clothes,
throw back the three hundred
thread-count sheets, waking
my husband. He’s met someone new
and now wants both
of his lives at once.
He can sleep later. These untamed
weeks, we’re savaging,
flesh against flesh, ravishing
our marriage.
Another Version of My Confession
By Lara Egger
Featured Art: Form No. 5: Affection for Shapeless Things by Onchi Koshiro
My affection is a tabloid on sale at register three.
Citing moral reservations, the produce section
prefers not to get involved. Even the usually forgiving
cauliflower thinks my choices are questionable.
Have you noticed how some days the rush-hour light
makes the world look as if it’s snorkeling?
Stalled in the desperation of the strip-mall parking lot,
I tally my indiscretions, dog-eared romances
steadily expiring like glove-compartment coupons.
What would have been saved had I not agreed to love them?
Some nights my affection petrifies the lake,
a hush of ice tempering what lies beneath, and others,
a storm invites the water to trouble freely.
The clocks will be turned forward and then back.
Darkness falling, yet another way to describe twilight,
another way, dusk. Will you still think I’m a terrible person
if I tell you I meet emptiness everywhere and my heart
slips easily into its pockets? Up and down the supermarket aisles,
past cold-shouldered Kleenex and tight-lipped Lean Cuisines,
past the chorus of deli cuts chanting its condemnation: my affection
is a tabloid on sale at register three. When the night manager closes up
he pulls last week’s scandal from the rack—old stock
but his wife likes to read them. I write Catastrophe’s name
in steam on the shower door. I offer to give him a ride home.
Read More
Day Residue in Winter
By Wes Civilz
Featured Art: Murol in the Snow by Victor Charreton
« For three days, no coffee;
there were headaches »
« On the fourth day, I have coffee again »
« My frozen intelligence melts open,
sizzling with otherworldly light,
but two hours later a slight sadness
and a fading of the perfect coffee feeling »
« Then comes a desire for beer »
« Then a quick feeling that now
is a moment I could be bored,
if I was a person who got bored,
but I am not »
« It is, however, too early in the day for beer
so I do the dishes, and observe that soap bubbles
are sly jokes told by the goddess of spheres »
« I drive to the dump, aka, the transfer station,
where I will transfer the waste of my life
into a cavernous compactor »
« (Other, more privileged things get to be recycled) »
« I behold the shapes of packaging
that held the things that I used—
that I used up »
« They are not lacking in beauty if looked at correctly:
plastic casing with two bulb shapes for headphones;
wax paper in the shape of a soap bar;
browning skin of a banana »
« Someone else will worry about them now »
Of a Burrito de Buche
By Patrick Mainelli
Featured Art: Committed to Tradition (Uberlieferung verpflichtet) by Monika Baer
I’m not drinking anymore. It’s not a court-ordered thing or medical imperative. I didn’t crash a car or assault a neighbor or luridly graze my cousin’s leg at the reception of her wedding. No one has ever even told me to “take it easy there” as I poured three, four, five fingers of scotch over ice. As a drunk, I’m purely congenial. Maybe I’ve tipped over a plate of food here and there, fallen asleep on the toilet once or twice, sung in competing volume with the Midnight Mass choir, but who hasn’t? After a nightful of drinks I am more inclined to turn embarrassingly casual with my affections than to become anything close to mean or combative.
So this is a self-imposed drought. Denial might be the word.
The shit thing is it’s July. Beer’s favorite month. Because after mowing a lawn or trimming a tree there is no reward like the reward of beer, and because to swim in the lake, to rest tired and near-naked on the shore, and to not drink a beer feels an affront to God’s finer generosities—July demands a beer.
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Dragonflies
By Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: Blue-tipped Dragonfly illustration from The Naturalist’s Miscellany by George Shaw
I wish you could see them: two thin blue needles
hovering above a bed of loosestrife and clover,
slivers of electricity, humming, almost invisible—
a glimmer of azure against the hillside. How
do their bodies hold the requisite organs?
Never mind the pull that makes them want
to wend their forms together this way. A tangle
of wires working themselves into union
this Sunday afternoon. Which, come to think of it,
is something I’d like to do with you, the portion
of desire I carry that much greater—as are the consequences
of crossing over into that lush country of dry grass
and end-of-summer weeds, where, if we weren’t
otherwise attached, we could make the most
of our own fleshly burden, lay it down
on the soft earth, its fine dust and buried flint,
the scattered flecks of fool’s gold.
Don’t you want to? Doesn’t it seem unfair
to be outdone by these mere fragments?
Almost more air than matter? But timing,
after all, is everything. And it looks like
I’ll have to appease myself with this tableau:
these two writhing out their little ecstasy
in broad daylight, coming together and then apart
and then together again, as if they had all day.
Which, given the brevity of their lives,
is quite a decadent expanse. Let’s try
and be happy for them, living into their late hours
with such abandon, while we are still
relatively young, the gift of want
stretched out before us, limitless and absolute.
Read More
The Problem
By Grant Clauser
Featured Art: Sketch for Beach Scene by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida
The town decided
that blowing up the body
was the best way to move it,
but the only explosives expert
was a groundskeeper
who’d planted mines in the war.
Still, people set up beach chairs
and umbrellas on the dune
to watch. When it blew,
slabs the size of picnic tables
crushed cars a quarter mile away.
One man was killed by a bone shard
through the heart.
Another still walks with a limp
from the impact of blubber.
For days the town pretended
this had all been the plan, everything
was good, but then under cover
of night, we rented front loaders
from the neighboring towns,
buried what we could and burned
the rest in smoky mounds
that choked us when the wind
blew in from the ocean.
The beach was unusable all summer.
Read More
Here’s the Plan
By Patrick Meeds
Featured Art: Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani
—For Amy Dickinson
You be a rubber bullet, and I’ll be fireworks
on TV. You dismantle your prejudices, and I’ll acquaint myself
with all the latest fads. You drag the river, I’ll manage expectations.
You shake your head and say yes, I’ll nod my head and say no.
I’ll call you Texas, and you can call me Nancy.
Practical and precise, we
will compile a list of things we will need. Warm clothes
and synchronized watches. Miniature technology and hand-drawn
maps. Invisible ink and antique stationery. The music of Django
Reinhardt and a list of all the patron saints.
Things we will avoid?
Strict adherence to dogma and barbed-wire fences. Left-handed
compliments and uncomfortable shoes. Complex algorithms
and attempts at perpetual motion. Sing-alongs and potluck suppers.
We will travel by train under
assumed identities and ride facing backwards. We will explain
ourselves to no one. Let’s be clear about one thing, reinvention
is the key. Look, there’s an abandoned car with a tree growing
through it. There’s an old bathtub with flowers planted in it.
There’s a fence made of old bicycle frames. There’s a car with an
antenna fashioned from an old coat hanger. These things were
one thing, now they are another.
Read More
My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance
By Kerry James Evans
Featured Art: Dryland Farming #24, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain by Edward Burtynsky
I spin like an adolescent bottle
pointing in empty directions,
the colors of the divided gym
spiraling like one of Mrs. Peters’
chemistry experiments, the blurry
girls staring, the boys huddled together
like cows in a thunderstorm.
A minute ago, I’d sensed the movement,
two Samanthas on their way to our side
with their rare request.
Would you like to . . . ?
But I wasn’t waiting. I’d have my say first.
Now, I listen for the beat to drop
and I pose, balancing
all my weight on my left hand,
each leg a limp karate kick.
I move as a squid flees
a cameraman’s light,
arms crawling like
honeysuckle along a trellis.
If I love my body,
if any of us love our bodies,
we don’t know it yet.
What I do know?
Wings of Wind
By Eliot Fintushel
Featured Art: West Wind by Duncan Grant
“He goes on wings of wind,” is what a psalm says, one of the psalms. Another one says, “Happy is he who shall grab your babies and hurl them against a rock.” When I try to explain these scriptures to Miriam and Cassie, they look at me like I’m stupid. Do you call that a friend? In the Jesus times, friends even kissed each other on the lips for hello—Miriam would be caught dead first. Cassie, okay, actually, even on the lips, which I am going to tell you about it, except for the fact that she is damned to Hell.
Like, I’m the one who is stupid! This is what the Bible says about sinners like Miriam and Cassie: “They have their reward.” Namely, shit.
Miriam wears this, like, Nazi dirndl, which she thinks is cool, with her curly once-upon-a-time blonde hair and with sunglasses with red rims, and she looks like melted cheese with a worm in it, but she walks like she thinks she is a beauty queen, you know, with, like, her one heel right in front of, like, the toe of her other foot, in a straight line, supposedly, except that it’s crooked!
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Creed for Atheists
By Matthew Buckley Smith
Featured Art: Bright Nothing by Sam Francis
Let us not speak of God
As if He were the nightmare of a naughty child,
Or a white lie for a widow,
Or a conscript’s consolation on the battlefield.
Let us instead be awed
By the nothingness we’ve chosen not to be awed by,
The shade whose earthly shadow
We’re standing in, the lie cast by a happy lie.
The face we turn away,
Let us turn it toward the others, let us find them out,
The ones who know the way
A sure thing looks when rounded with a little doubt,
The same ones every day
Who, kneeling all together in a common room,
Pray for their pets and pray
As well for us, their company in a common doom.
Let’s take no satisfaction,
But concentrate on what we say when we say no:
That dead we are the same,
That time falls fast across the fading light like snow,
That man is an anxious motion
Of matter upon matter, liquor upon tongue,
The neurotransmitter’s flame
Upon the dendrite’s kindling—bright, and not for long.
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The Spiritual Exercises
By Lisa Ampleman
Everyone on television is apologizing.
I’m sorry I kissed your sister. I’m sorry
I sold the dog. We watch, each with our own
TV screen we walk or run toward. The treadmills’
wheels whine louder and louder.
In the strength training area, a man grunts
and drops a heavy weight. I wish I hadn’t eaten
so many foods with high fructose corn syrup.
I’m sorry I got you addicted to sugar.
On one wall-mounted TV, two men in an octagon
with netted sides try to kick each other
in the face. When one pins the other,
he moves gradually, pulling the loser’s arm
further up, maximum pain. The other
struggles to buck him off. It makes me feel sick.
There are two minutes left in the round.
I’m sorry I voted against you. I didn’t come here
to make friends. A few men shout
as they play hoops on a half court,
but the rest of us are silent and alone
in our movement. We must contort our bodies
to give them fitness, here in the kingdom
of calisthenics, our feet dully hitting
the treads. I’m useless; I can’t get rid of
this stack of Sears Catalogs
or this broken walking cane. I’m sorry
that the house is full of trash.
“Exercises,” too, Ignatius called
the spiritual retreats that “have
as their purpose the conquest of self.”
The Jesus Bus
By Melissa Studdard
Featured Art: Children’s Games by Édouard Jean Vuillard
came early, sputtering and spilling
Kumbaya from the windows,
the little punks inside eating a breakfast
of Pop Rocks and candy cigarettes left over from Halloween
and hiding the wrappers in the creases
between seatback and seat. I never sang
but floated instead in my own world of thought.
All you had to do was look at an issue
of National Geographic to know everything
was extraordinary and people’s bones were full of stars.
Cecil, the driver, got his neighbors
to help paint the Jesus bus into a roll of Lifesavers candies—
all bright and vertically striped—green, yellow, red, and orange,
Lifesaver in perfect white script across a strip of blue. Cecil,
tenderhearted conveyor of children to the terrible glory of New
Light Baptist Church, Cecil, who after nearly hitting a squirrel,
had to pull to the side of the highway to pray. Who could blame him
for not understanding that the grace he sought was already on his bus,
packed into forty-two little sugar-smacking bodies?
And hadn’t I once killed a frog by trying to save it?
Spilled it hard on the sidewalk like the spoils of an egg?
If the sky had ruptured above me, I would have cleaned up the clouds
and apologized for the mess. But the rebel gods kept
hanging around me like Woodstock hippies, so I dared some revival
to happen with the Christ frog. I was six and still
decades away from translating the voices tiptoeing through my mind.
Everywhere I went, I looked for spiderwebs with secret messages.
Maybe there was a pig to save. And when the bus backfired,
I thought I saw an afterlife emerge. Weeks later,
when I awoke screaming the fourth night in a row, I wanted
my parents to tell me it was possible for us to be alive
without hurting each other. I wasn’t dreaming of squirrels
or frogs. Just the Sunday School lesson on wartime and atheism:
how the good of us, when commanded by soldiers,
refused to stomp on a picture of Jesus
and so had their heads chopped off,
how I too should be willing at all costs
to keep my feet clean of my lord.
I was a good girl and learned my lessons well.
From others’ non-Christian necks would grow something
as secular and boring
as heads. But from my neck, an endless field,
and in that field,
congregations upon congregations of daisies—
all of them wearing the sad face of night.
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Fez Postcard / Call to Prayer
By Jacqueline Osherow
Featured Art: North Avenue Market by Aaron Bohrod
A jeweler holds a magnet to his silver
to prove its purity (there’s no pull)
A seller wraps a package for a buyer
who’s never quite assented to the sale
A flash and then another as a weaver
shuttles spun agave silk through wool
and then a blast of sound / a change of air
at once the market’s hustle-bustle trivial
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
even if business does go on as usual.
The world seems to refine itself, each color
more acute, each syllable, each smell:
the sharp scent of cedar where a carpenter
planes and sands an ornate floral grille
cumin laced with cardamom and coriander
(the spice seller’s stall) rose petal, fennel
or orange blossom just pressed to attar
escaping from a shapely crystal vial
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
every vista turns devotional:
the gorgeous rows of vats for dyeing leather
(for yellow, saffron, for red, poppy flower,
spearmint mixed with indigo for teal)
are bright-robed worshippers who’ve joined to kneel
in unison and chant Allahu akbar
God is great and powerful
as stragglers head to fountains to splash water
on hands and feet and face and then unroll
the mats they keep with them, each a small
but resolutely holy house of prayer.
Blessed Is He
By Jeff Tigchelaar
Featured Art: Christ Blessing by Martin Schongauer
How am I?
Blessed. Blessed. I am
just blessed. God is good. Not afraid
to brag on God. Brag all day
on Big Man. My fiancée
just graduated. Junior college right across the street.
Four point O. See? God. He’s good. I’m looking
for work. The other day who do
I happen to meet
but the owner of Huntington Steel.
If that’s not God right there.
You can’t tell me that’s not a God Thing.
He’s workin’ it. Every day. Everywhere. I’m going
to Israel, by the way. Jerusalem. Judah. Judah, you know,
was Jacob’s fourth son. Now
Moses, though—God didn’t let just anybody
bury Moses. Dude was holy. An angel
had to put old Moses in the ground. Archangel Michael.
Jude 9. Look it up. Good Book.
Moses was so holy. Up there
two weeks with God on that mountain.
Gettin’ those Commandments. No Moses, no tablets.
Moses got blessed like nobody’s business.
Love me some Ten Commandments, though.
Love me some Shalt Nots and Covets. Don’t Covets.
God bless Moses. I’m just
blessed to be able to tell you about Moses. Share that
Word with you today. The man was like God’s Number Three.
Maybe Two. Right behind Jesus. Blessed as hell.
I’m about to be blessed with that steel job, though.
Think how hard Moses would work that. Mr. Bulrushes.
Mr. Burning Bush. Mr. Hold Up That Rod,
Throw Down That Staff . . . but now he’s dead and can’t
so I’m the man. Work my ass off get that good reward.
This Is a .50-Caliber Wound
By Jeff Tigchelaar
Featured Art: The Lonely Farm, Nantucket by George Inness
Knee surgery? Hell no
I didn’t have knee surgery.
That’s a .50-caliber wound.
I got bullet holes
up and down this leg.
Running through rice paddies.
Never mind that.
I need people to work. Know anybody?
People don’t want
to work no more. I need people
to throw hay. People can’t
throw hay no more.
Hundred-thirty-eight-pound bales, all day
out in the sun. It’s good work. If you’re strong. I pay
twelve-thirteen dollars an hour
so spread the word. The silt
in the air’s a bitch to deal with, though.
Especially if you’re not used to it. I’m used to it
and still it gives me fits. I got to cough
and puke it out and believe me, it takes a while.
Purple Heart?
No. No I didn’t get one. It’s complicated. I wasn’t that
“good” a soldier, we’ll say.
Purple hearts are for . . .
Never mind. It’s just—it’s not worth it.
Never worth it. Especially today. Kids
come back fucked.
I’d never go. I’d stay,
work the family farm.
That’s where I am. Now.
I’ve got five brothers, four sisters,
and we keep about three guys full-time.
And my dad keeps timberwolves.
Gets ’em from a friend of his in Canada.
We got so many deer out there—we shoot
about ten a year for jerky. I only come into town
to donate plasma. I hate the city.
And I hate people, to be honest.
Know anybody
up for throwing hay, though—
send ’em my way.
I need people.
Read More
Reverse Sculpture
By Richard Dey
Featured Art: Untitled by Richard M. Loving
As the stone shrinks, the form expands.
—Michaelangelo
It’s like sculpting in reverse,
learning about love:
Here’s a Maiden or Aphrodite or Venus,
naked and polished
or is it the Doryphorus or David or . . .
Isn’t s/he nice? The Ideal in spirit and form?
Miss or Mister Universe!
Then, in reverse, as you learn
about the apple of your eye
in revelations you can hardly believe,
(marble with veins like that!
granite with such cracks!),
the stone chipped away chips back
chip by chip, and chunk by chunk,
all superfluous fugitives reuniting,
and not without the dusty air re-ringing
with the tap-tapping of
chisel and mallet, point and hammer,
refilling all the subtle negative spaces
that defined the planes and rhythms—
mound and hollow, ridgeline and gap—
and the warmth that passed
from the sculptor’s hands into the work,
all his perseverance, passes back . . .
until before you grandly stands, unhewn
and cold, a breathless, glacial block of stone,
Lovelessness now reappointed
whose last words (whispered
with chiseled lips lastly parted) were,
“Darling, are you disappointed?”
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Arrangement in Gray and Black
By Laurie Rosenblatt
Featured Art: Composition with Black and Gray by Claude Ronald Bentley
In the straight-backed chair
for hours for hours after
a drug-stilled night for hours
after dream-hungry sleep she sits
in the straight-backed chair
unmoving for night
after night after leaning spent
against the steel surface
of sleep after staying by habit
on the right side of the bed
as if as if—
although some time does go missing
as if an owl passed like a ghost
its wing-beats deepening the silence
before the milkweed
from that half-dreaming
streams away.
And because the skin knows
after the brain does
and the reptile brain knows
after the self
the arm believes and reaches palm held out flat
seeking that other skin
and animal comfort.
Because the palm is capable
because a limb if lost may still feel
and because it feels may find grass-itch,
wind-brush, the love-mad path of fingers,
and pain. Because this is so
the palm believes
and finds the ghost it seeks
but the streaming milkweed
is carried away by the sun
that leaps onto the bed
and sinks its claws in.
Then dream-hungry she sits
on the straight-backed chair a
figure in gray and black.
Read More
Ye Are of More Value than Many Sparrows
By Elton Glaser
Featured Art: Sparrows and wisteria by Utagawa Hiroshige
Luke 12:7
How many sparrows are enough? I can’t tell
If there are more this afternoon than yesterday.
And if there’s one missing, or two, or eight,
What does it matter? All I know is
They are not so many since I took the feeders down
After your death. They came for the seeds
Your kind hands set out. I give them nothing.
Now, if they come, they come only
For reasons of their own, these quick birds
Dowdy in their grays and browns, and leave behind
That whistle and trill, or the echo of it,
Singing not for me, but for the moment’s pleasure
Of lifting their wings in warm air, alive
To the light. And in their easy glide and sweep,
Oblivious of anything but song, I find myself
A listener outside the choir, and still
Inside those memories of the missing kindness
That drew them here, however many, however few.
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Haunting Houses
By Jacqueline Doyle
Featured Art: The Customs House at Varengeville by Claude Monet
In the movie I’m watching with my husband, “A Ghost Story,” a woman lies in bed with a lover and tells him a story. “When I was little and we used to move all the time, I’d write these notes and I would fold them up really small. And I would hide them.” “What’d they say?” he asks. “They’re just things I wanted to remember,” she says, “so that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me there waiting.”
*
We were in elementary school when my best friend moved out of the red house on the lake. She was moving hundreds of miles away, the rooms had been emptied, and we ran all over the house leaving tiny notes about our enduring friendship. There was a door in the upstairs-hall ceiling with a ladder to the attic, where we tucked notes in hidden spaces under the eaves. There was a small door allowing access to the bathroom pipes on the second floor. A dark basement with several rooms and pipes on the ceiling. Our footsteps echoed as we ran up and down stairs.
*
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April 21st
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: A Pond Near Rousillon by Adolphe Appian
It’s the birthday of John Muir and Charlotte Brontë,
born just 18 years apart,
she in Yorkshire and he somewhere in Scotland,
both in their basinets under the same gray clouds,
but then their lives diverge so radically
you might begin to question the claims of astrologers,
if you haven’t had the sense to do that already.
Muir heads off to Wisconsin (with his parents I guess),
whereas Charlotte is placed in a nearby boarding school.
Muir then stomps all over North America,
exulting in Nature and writing it all down,
while Charlotte stays mostly indoors composing poems
with her sisters, Emily and Anne.
He leaves us Picturesque California, she Jane Eyre.
I don’t have much on my calendar for today,
another April 21st featuring a walk around the lake,
then boxing up the cat and driving her to the vet.
It’s overwhelming to think of all the things
I’m not doing today, including being born.
But I will say that my life, maybe like yours,
falls somewhere between John Muir’s and Charlotte Brontë’s.
My morning walk takes under an hour,
but I do pay attention to the water and the birds,
and here I am writing a poem, just like the Brontë sisters. Muir was blinded for a spell,
Charlotte married then died still pregnant,
and I’ve had the same headache for more than a month.
And if that’s what ends up killing me,
would someone please slide this poem
into a side pocket of the coat they bury me in?
Until then, let us picture John Muir
on a windy mountaintop in Oregon
waving in the direction of the coastal dunes,
while Charlotte Brontë lifts her head
from her morning prayers, recalling that it’s her birthday.
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The Card Players
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: Playing Card by Piero Fornasetti
I’m glad Cezanne was not here in Key West
to set up an easel and paint
the card game I was in last night,
unless he was really good at depicting despondency.
Cezanne once said that a single carrot,
if painted in a completely fresh way,
would be enough to set off a revolution.
I’ll bet he was sitting in a café that day
where such observations are usually made,
but if I had been sitting in that café
across from Cezanne I would have quipped
“Maybe if Bugs Bunny were in charge of things,”
and I would have described in a fresh way
how the famous rabbit might be portrayed
pointing the mob to the Bastille with a carrot.
Beer and chips and more beer and chips
were served at the poker table,
but no carrot soup, a staple on every menu
in the bunny rabbit stories of Beatrix Potter
and a dish that would have warmed me
inside and out the way a good soup does
and made me feel much better
about losing all my money and then some.
But at least now I have found the answer
to the old question of who would you invite
to your ideal dinner party:
Paul Cezanne, Bugs Bunny, Beatrix Potter,
and okay, maybe at the last minute, Gore Vidal.
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Made-up Saints
By Claire Scott
Wile E. Coyote free-falling from a cliff,
Sylvester flattened by an iron safe,
scads of sodden Kleenex at my side.
I put my name on a waitlist for mercy
(a light-year long).
I murmur worn mantras,
send prayers to made-up saints:
Saint Jackson of bankruptcy,
Saint Tiffany of clogged toilets,
Saint Lester of shapeless days
& tedious tomorrows,
Saint Elmer of the toss-and-turn.
Someone else dreams my dreams at night.
Am I missing the point
or was it never there?
A diver yanks a rope,
a wrestler taps out.
I tip over my King.
Checkmate.
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Aubade with Looney Tunes
By Matthew Luzitano
Featured Art: Chelly Canyon by Alice Kagawa Parrott
Your love is a tunnel
painted on a canyon wall.
My love is an Acme,
ripped open despite
certain failure. The TV,
at least, is turned on,
and you say, “Well, that makes
one of us.” Years of this bickering—
can’t Bugs and Daffy
just kiss already? Instead,
the duck marches into the glade
of a dozen cocked rifles.
Why does desire keep ending
in violence? The cat catches
white paint and the skunk
tears apart Paris after her.
You want more thrills? Let’s run
over something in the road.
If the two of us follow the sunset
off a cliff but never look down
are we really falling? In this episode,
lover is a word that means
two people embracing
the same stick of dynamite.
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Tightrope
By William Fargason
Featured Art: Young Couple by Emil Nolde
On the TV, a man is attempting
to cross the Grand Canyon by walking
on a tightrope. He holds
a large pole to balance himself,
slippered feet cupped around
the two-inch metal wire. What poise,
balance. We are watching this together
because you’ve driven over
to pick me up for dinner, but neither
of us will turn off the TV
or stand up. By now, we are invested
in the outcome. You pull closer
to me on the couch. Will he make it
across? Will the cameras keep rolling
if not? His family waits on the other
side of the canyon. Your hand
on my leg tightens when the wind
picks up, causes the man to bend
down, pivot the pole to regain balance.
I can smell the perfume you’re wearing
because we are going to a nice place
for once, that French restaurant
with all the candles. Your neck smells of lilacs,
or pancakes burning. I can never tell.
I know you won’t leave him
for me—and the man is halfway across
by now, the wind pushing against him,
forcing him to pause again—but I can
hope. I kiss your cheek. You smile.
Ten minutes of him moving one foot
at a time, holding his weight
against the wire, 1500 feet up
in the air, no safety net. You ask if
your car will be towed if you parked on
the street. I don’t think so. But we have
to leave for our reservation, we are
going to be late. I turn off the TV.
Looking back, how terrible
it might have been if you loved me.
Read More
Loose Ends
By Gregory Djanikian
Featured Art: Starry Night and the Astronauts by Alma Thomas
I’ve been pacing the afternoon
like a high-wire walker
from room to room
counting the steps.
Dear Flying Wallendas,
help me reach out across the canyon
of lost connections.
Philippe Petit, speak to me
as if I were your balancing pole.
The letters I’ve written—
let them send me back a sign
they’ve been thumbed.
Let the numbers I’ve called
redial themselves till sun-up.
It’s the neighbor’s pickup driving away
pinging gravel with its tires,
it’s the geese barking the end of summer
that’s got me wishing for binoculars.
The fall leaves are floating down
as if they had something important
to say to the ground.
It’s been Sunday here all week.
I’m holding out for big-box deliveries.
I’m waiting in my soft-soled shoes
for the dog to bark.
Someone, come knock on my door.
Let’s see who’s inside.
Read More
The Blue Goodness
By Maureen McGranaghan
Franklin ducks into the janitor’s closet and mutters into the iPod Greg bought him. The Goodness is here. It is definitely here. Last night, the blue tarp stopped flapping, and it got very quiet. Then the Goodness filled the whole house like heat from the radiators. Greg and Kate stopped fighting and went to sleep. Now it is everywhere: The Blue Goodness
Franklin hears his name on the intercom. He is being called to Mr. Volpe’s office, so he puts his iPod in his pocket and emerges from the closet.
Mr. Volpe greets him, fiddling with his watch chain and rubbing the bald spot on his head. His voice sounds like rocks grinding against each other. Franklin thinks about the rocks when he speaks. How many?
“Your brother—is he sick?” Mr. Volpe asks.
Four rocks. Small. “Yes. He is. He has walking pneumonia.”
“Tell him to get an excuse.”
“Okay.”
“Have your mom write an excuse.”
Kate won’t do this because she says Roger deserves to have the book thrown at him, but Franklin says, “I’ll tell her.”
Read More
Judgement Call
By James Lineberger
Featured Art: Man with a Pipe by Pablo Picasso
I don’t know why you won’t show
your face maybe you
don’t know how maybe there’s some
rule about it
or you might be still sleeping or lost
somewhere in
between but if that’s the case
then why do you send these butterflies
to land on Barbara’s
arm and make her candle lights
switch on all
by themselves at four a.m.
and Robert said just yesterday
that you pop
up now and then in his dreams hands
in your pockets
leaning against a wall
and when he asks you what
it’s like you shrug and say it’s
okay which
is all right with me I don’t care how
much you share
with everybody else but unless
you mean to shut me out altogether
then isn’t it about
time we decided on something for
ourselves because
the way it is now I close my eyes
and I can’t even make
out your features your face is just a blank
like somebody wearing
a fencing mask or else I’ll try
to call you up
In the Gas Station Bathroom With My New Son
By Amy O’Reilly
Someone scratched out the C so it reads “Baby hanging Station.”
What isn’t conspiring to kill Baby?
Pillow. Blanket. Mother’s sleeping body like an island
resort battened down for the wet season,
the beds stripped of their festive linens,
clink of glasses beneath the bar while outside
the storm rages.
Motherhood turns out to be
less spot the warning signs,
more choose which ones to heed—
Like this floating table, its baby-sized crater
inundated with other tiny humans’ feces.
Beneath the black safety strap
my son looks sacrificial,
like he’s about to be experimented on.
Even when I’ve chosen right I have surely chosen wrong.
Read More
Guardian
By Rebecca Haas
Featured Art: Angel by Luc Tuymans
The station wagon’s engine’s going faulty. We’re driving 20 mph on the right side of the highway, half in the slow lane, half on the shoulder. Mom’s got both hands clenched on the steering wheel, leaning over the dashboard like she’s urging the car forward with sheer will. The car moves in rhythmic gasps, pausing in between the surges, catching its breath. Mom whispers, quiet so the little ones can’t hear. Bad, bad, bad. This is baaaaaad.
She turns to me and says, “I’ve got the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.” Like, can you believe this shit?
We’re just outside of Gainesville, Florida, headed back home to Cincinnati. For ten years—since my brother Kevin was born—we’ve gone on a family vacation to Florida. Mom said it’d be no different this summer, even after the divorce. But we didn’t go to the coast, where we used to go when Dad was with us. We went to Central Florida, to Ocala, where Mom’s sister Florence lives.
“You’re batshit crazy driving four kids down to Florida by yourself,” Flo said.
The air coming in the car windows feels like steam from a hot shower and smells like Kevin’s farts. Sweat has my bare thighs glued to the pleather front seat. The baby’s asleep on a quilt in the way back. My sister Kate is sprawled out on her stomach over most of the back seat, reading Mom’s book, Flowers in the Attic, which she shouldn’t be reading because she’s only eight. Behind me, Kevin is squished against the door so no part of his body will touch Kate’s skin, his feet dancing a jig on the back of my seat.
Read More
No One Dies in Fiction Anymore
By Kaj Tanaka
Featured Art: Heart of Darkness by Sean Scully
I. Sherman Alexie
Once again last night, a dead woman appeared to me. She spoke my name and asked me to help her back into the world of the living. She said she was so close to me; it would only take a small caress and she would be flesh and blood again. I didn’t move. Her face hung over my bed until the dream resolved itself, and I was awake again, and this morning was gray and cold just like yesterday morning and the morning before.
This morning, I heard our neighbors’ little daughter crying in the room above us amid the crashing of furniture while her parents fought. The crying and the fighting were so loud my wife wondered if we should call the police—we decided not to, and then my wife left for work, and the fighting died down. I texted my wife to let her know things were quiet again. She texted me “okay.”
Today, I read Sherman Alexie’s poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” for the first time. I have spent the last three years of my life writing a novel about the time I spent living on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and when I read Sherman Alexie’s poem, I realized that what I had written, while true, was not useful. No one needed my novel, and I was stupid to think anyone did in the first place. I should have known a year ago when one of my Lakota friends ended our relationship because of this novel—when he heard what it was about, when I told him. We’d been drinking out in the bad-lands; the sun was coming up, and I asked for his approval—“blessing” I think I said. He threw an empty bottle at me. He told me I was selling him out just like all white people do eventually, which is pretty much what Sherman Alexie was saying also. And the next day, we were hungover, and we pretended to have blacked out the entire incident. Even so, we have not spoken since.
Read More
At the Outpatient Clinic
By Andrea Hollander
Featured Art: Free Clinic by Jacob Lawrence
The young woman in the maroon hat
is tapping her left foot as she stares
into her empty lap. She’s kept her coat on,
its collar of fake fur buttoned at her throat.
The woman’s face is pale—blanched is the word
I was about to use, but my mother’s name was Blanche
and I don’t want to think of her, the way at the end
she grew so white and thin, her hair so black
I thought someone had rinsed it with ink. She lay so flat
beneath those hospital sheets, I thought at first
the bed empty, that they had taken her away.
Now a man I didn’t see before gawks at me,
his eyes earnest, green, and stern like my father’s.
“Angela,” he says. “No,” I say, but he keeps staring.
I’m saved when his name is called,
and he turns his head the way my mother did
that last time when I stood at the foot of her bed,
her name on a blue card inserted
into the slot beside the door.
She stirred when she heard my voice,
then turned away.
My mother’s head of ink-black hair
on that bleached white pillow,
her name typed out in block letters
on one of those little blue cards.
What do they do with them
afterwards?
Read More
And Later I Will Forget About the Bread
By Andrea Hollander
Featured Art: From the Kitchen by Ruth Levy
I try to stop glancing at the clock, try
to focus instead on the task at hand, dusting
my palms with flour, lifting the round ball
of dough from the board, slapping it down again.
My son is driving home, his first solo trip,
his teenage eyes partially, I hope, fixed
on the highway’s center line.
From my kitchen radio, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
I can never tell which one, the way I never remember
what Daylight Savings is supposed to save us.
I knead the dough to the music,
pick up the sluggish ball, slap it down,
push the heel of my hand into it,
fold it, pick it up, slap it down.
When my son was born he nearly died.
Now the clock declares him
five minutes late, then ten.
I place the dough into the ceramic bowl
he gave me for my birthday
and cover it with a damp cotton cloth.
The music moves from one season to the next,
the strings vibrant now and airy.
Twelve minutes late, says the clock.
The dough will surely rise. And spring
will come, then summer. But only
if the car pulls into the driveway,
his house key clicks in the lock.
Read More
This Is How It Will Feel
By Jennifer Watkins
Featured Art: Woman and Child by Mary Cassatt
At three years old, you will sit beside me in a rusty Ford as we head south on I-95. The air conditioning will blow lukewarm air, and you will feel hot and sticky. From the carrier in the backseat, our cat will growl long and low. Looking out of the passenger window, you will see stacks of steel lattice speed by, connected by strands of drooping lines. Through the back windshield, a shrinking ribbon of asphalt, lengthening and disappearing into the horizon. After many hours, the dirt will turn from brown to orange.
“I want my daddy,” you will say.
“Daddy’s staying in Maryland,” I will reply.
A few weeks later, after boxes have been unpacked in the Georgia apartment complex called Cherry Tree Hill, a card will arrive in the mail. Tearing open the envelope, you will find a photograph of your father. He’ll be sitting in a leather office chair, smiling for his daughter’s benefit and wearing neatly pressed blues. You will clutch the picture to your chest, pressing your cheek against its sharp edges. You will kiss the photo over and over. I will tell you to stop.
“You’ll ruin it,” I’ll say.
I will hold you as you cry, and you will hear my heart beat as you lie against my chest. At three years old, you will learn: your mother is flesh and blood. Your father is envelopes and stamps.
Read MoreLocal News
By Christopher Kempf
Or dearest theater.
Aren’t we
all, the premise is, for one
half hour, in tight zoom, suitable
for history? The Lyndhurst couple
married, this weekend, at the bagel shop
on Central. Who met
among the jams & pumpernickels.
The suspect
who fled the Chevron holdup
on horseback.
Athens, for instance,
was less its democracy—solemn
ecclesia, Plato
bent to his parchment—than
the price of goat’s milk in the Way
of Sheepherders. Ahead
at five—teens
skipping sleep. Teens
at St. Cecilia’s filling the boot
for Alzheimer’s. Teens trend-
huffing. Behind the co-hosts
the city poses on its screen. Sunset
flashes. For a minute
our sundry lesser dramas—our bodies
pulled from retention ponds, holiday
toy lineups—form
a single American skyline. Small nation
of lotto & weather radar.
The ecclesia—they
did so, they believed, to banish
the idea of distance—prohibited
star-gazing, so faithful
they were to the stage
& polis.
At Taco Bell
yesterday, two men
pulled knives on each other because,
they said, of a woman. One
drove off with her. The other
sacked Troy. We take you
live, now, to Friday’s parade route. We
will stay with this story
as it evolves.
Read More
These People
By Anele Rubin
Featured Art: Green Park by Dorothea Tanning
These people strolling through the park
with baby carriages and frisbees
have no idea
my sister choked to death
on a sausage
after being released
from a mental hospital down south
but they may know I’ve been crying
and wonder what I’m writing
in my little yellow book
sitting in the grass next to the only dandelion
left in the park
with my big black dog
whose fur is shaven on one side
and they may notice
I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes
and my gray hair hasn’t been combed lately,
but maybe not,
because a young woman with a child
stops before me,
asks where the duck pond is
and waits, smiling,
as I explain the best route
and her little girl
looks right in my face,
asks if she can pet my dog
and what his name is, says
he’s pretty.
Read More
Timeless Beauty
By Brian Hall
Featured Art: Costumes Parisiens by Manteau de Zibelin
What does she tell me, wind?
—Louis Aragon
My grandmother is a Louis Vuitton model.
Though she will never see the streets
of Île Saint-Louis or pose
along the Seine clutching a Monogram
Canvas Petite Malle iPhone case,
she does drift through grainy nostalgia
like Sora Choi; she does stare beyond
the moment like Sasha Lane, who yearns
to wear soigné dresses and be admired
near rue de la Femme-sans-Tête.
My grandmother is a flâneuse of Youngstown,
shuffling near the faded edges.
In the middle of the road,
she stops traffic because she is
elegance: the wind rippling
her white robe around her as she looks
over her shoulder, gazing
at an audience—drivers, police,
grandchildren, and daughters—
she no longer understands
and at the seasons forever lost.
Read More
Black Sesame
By Adrienne Su
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Fulling Silk (Uchiginu) by Kamisaka Sekka
Had I stayed in touch with black sesame,
much would have turned out differently.
For years I forgot the late nights with my mother,
the small bowls of hot sweetened water,
porcelain spoons, and white dumplings
with almost-black black-sesame filling
dwelling somewhere between dessert
and snack, erasing the not-quite hunger
that holds off sleep. At that hour
their strangeness didn’t register:
no one else could see them; the notion
of soup as dessert could be taken
for granted; the lack of an English
name caused no confusion. Packaged,
frozen, easy to heat, they could be served
within minutes of craving, all records
of indulgence swept away as quickly.
Perhaps it was this simplicity,
decades later, that made me feel at peace
in a void. It didn’t feel like sacrifice
to forgo a confection
I had left to oblivion.
What finally reminded me
that I had made myself lonely
was black sesame’s coming into fashion—
cakes, gelato, pastry—the recognition
a mild punch to the abdomen
like that moment in a museum
when a terracotta soldier, a Frida Kahlo,
or an archaic torso of Apollo
turns what you thought was satiety
into a quest for family.
Read More
The News of Touch
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Geese amid Reeds by Ohara Koson
Since his illness, my father feeds
the crook-necked goose every day.
He walks to the pond on diabetic feet,
careful as the path pitches and rolls under him
like a swinging bridge.
He wears suspenders over sloped shoulders,
the shirt tucked over a sagging belly.
Of course he would share with me,
if I didn’t stay away. There’s enough seed
in his bag for both of us. But I’d rather pull weeds
two towns over than see his shaking.
They greet him with a mighty honking,
wings flapping and dripping with light,
then surround him, hoarse with need.
A preacher, he is used to feeling loved
for what he has in his pocket for the flock.
But his pulpit days are long over.
He pulls out his bag of seed
and teeters toward the water’s edge.
A tremor shakes his hand
and the seed spills beneath
writhing necks and thrashing wings.
When the honking stops and the birds leave,
he goes down on one knee, though it costs him.
There is enough seed left to cover a palm.
His good hand steadies the other, and he waits
for the crook-necked gander. Alone also,
the bird finally appears from bulrushes.
This is their agreement:
my father will save a shaking handful
for the crook-necked goose, and in return
the goose will touch him,
pushing its bill across his palm, nuzzling
his fingers long after the grain is gone.
Read More
A Small Prayer
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Ce fut un religieux mystère by Maurice Denis
—After Ada Limon
Behind the rotting fence in their first house,
my mom and dad are eating canned mushroom soup
over buttered toast in a one-bedroom Kentucky clapboard
where a turntable spins the same Bill Gaither Trio record,
“Because He Lives,” until they go almost mad
with their stained Formica floor and overflowing toilet
and their longing for heaven, and I love them so.
She is crying at the stove because today
she crashed the rusted Dodge Dart and he has no way
to drive the circuit of his churches in the morning—
preaching at each about the Second Coming
and how to get right with Jesus. I want to offer
her a beer, but there I am in her womb,
kicking to be noticed among their other troubles
and, in any event, she has never had a drink.
He is thinking about his sermon,
the one that will end in an altar call because
he knows people need to walk toward something together
after they have walked away from each other all week long.
First the white church, then the black one across town.
And my father is going to save the country, and then the world
by baptizing its citizens one by dripping one.
Nights, they watch the news on a black-and-white
Magnavox, wrestling with the rabbit ears
to see, through the snow of static
what the world is becoming, believing
it will end in the best way possible.
During the week, she delivers babies
in her starched white uniform, knowing,
in these last days, they will never die.
Years later, some might say their hope
was not a hope, or was not the right kind of hope,
but rather a sort of escape from the reality of their time,
but I want to tell you some hope is better than none.
Look at them there, on their knees, praying
their small prayer. Not for the healing
of the nation, or for an end to the war,
but something more manageable, more
imaginable—for a car to start, for something
in its crushed innards to turn over and catch fire.
Read More
Feature: Gems of the 21st
Editors’ Note:
If, at the turn of the 22nd century, there is still such a thing as an anthology. If readers of poetry continue to entertain the sometimes troublesome idea that ten or twenty poems can reflect whole movements, schools, trends. If the looking-back literati—skeptical of Automaticism, 2101’s prevailing poetic tendency—seek some sense of our long-gone zeitgeist . . . If all that. Then what poems will be read as representative of the early 21st century? Say, from 2001 to 2018?
We asked some of our collaborators to take their best guess.
We suggested that, first, they consider poems that are great own their own—devastating, voicy, gut-busting. But, second, we wanted to hear about poems that address the Big Issues—or what might be remembered as the Big Issues—of our day.
Adrienne Su, Emily Mohn-Slate, Anders Carlson-Wee, Tony Hoagland, Chiyuma Elliott, Keith Kopka, Veronica Schuder, and Mario Chard took up the challenge. Here are their choices:
“The Woman in the Moon,” by Carol Ann Duffy • “The Kind of Man
I Am at the DMV,” by Stacey Waite • “Among the Prophets” and
“Breakers, before the Feds shut it down,” by Essy Stone • “Statue
of Liberty,” by Ann Killough • “Since You Ask,” by Carl Phillips •
“Epithalamion Ex Post Facto” by Joshua Bell • “A Small Gesture of
Gratitude,” by Mark Bibbins • “Another Poem on Blue,” by Claire
Bateman • “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” by Katherine Larson •
“Look,” by Solmaz Sharif
These are poems, to borrow from Mario Chard’s title, that see the present deeply. They’re some of the Gems of the 21st.
Art Is Long, Planets Short: The Lasting Power of Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Woman in the Moon”
By Adrienne Su
I have mixed feelings about my belief that Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Woman in the Moon” is likely to endure well into and beyond the 21st century. The happy side is aesthetic: it has disciplined quatrains, playful alliteration, inconspicuous rhymes, and a cascade of clear images that are of the immortal kind. Its metrical dexterity nods to centuries of poetic convention, and while free verse has been more popular than formal for some time now, contemporary poets of enduring power, like Duffy, readily deploy elements of unfree verse even when not writing in strict forms, making poems as musically precise as they are creative and intellectual—the point of poetry. The reason I am unhappy that the poem is likely to be representative of this era is thematic. It’s a piece about patriarchal power and the destruction of the planet, and its message is urgent.
“The Woman in the Moon” in the poem speaks in place of the archetypal “man in the moon,” recasting that character as a woman who is irritated by the human assumption that this figure of legend must be male. In the wry voice of your most opinionated aunt (who always turns out to be right), she tells the inhabitants of Earth—addressed as “Darlings”—her thoughts on observing them through the ages. Affectionate and annoyed, she sympathizes with their struggles (our struggles) yet bemoans their abuse (our abuse) of the planet; and the poem’s final sentence laments its destruction. Along the way, the speaker shows herself to be a force not only of nurturing watchfulness but also of literary mastery. She is not only talking; she’s writing to us, it seems, and this woman in the moon is not just any writer. She is demonstrably a poet.
Read More
“Gender’s Tidy Little Story”: On Stacey Waite’s “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV”
by Emily Mohn-Slate
On July 1, 2016, Mississippi HB 1523 was signed into law. One of its provisions states, “Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.” This bill codifies discrimination toward anyone whose gender does not fit the sex they were assigned at birth. How can a poem best speak to HB 1523, and to our daily lives as gendered beings?
Stacey Waite’s “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV” (Butch Geography, Tupelo Press, 2013) dives headfirst into this question as the speaker encounters a boy in a Midwestern DMV:
Read More
What Essy Stone Done to Us
By Anders Carlson-Wee
Essy Stone: write it down if you have to, but don’t forget the name. Her poetry is voice-driven, deeply rooted in place, narrative in all the best ways, and tough as fuck. It’s also weirdly inviting. Many of her poems are dramatic monologues, addressing the reader directly, and her work is musically deft, grotesque, grotesquely funny, and a total pleasure to read. Sitting in a café the other day, I found myself smiling while rereading her debut collection What It Done to Us; I handed the book to a friend, who burst out laughing within seconds. The collection was selected by Gary Copeland as winner of the 2016 Idaho Prize and published by Lost Horse Press in 2017. (Get yourself a copy.)
Stone builds much of her thematic tension through cinching together seemingly disparate forces: God and domestic violence; the Devil and homesickness; Christian testimonials and hotel blowjobs. In “Among the Prophets,” which was originally published in The New Yorker, she takes on religion, sex, deception, poverty, small-town life, Southern conservatism, the KKK, and what it’s like to love and hate a father who wishes his daughter were a son. It’s a prose poem that paints a portrait of the speaker’s dad, who, people say, is “possessed by the spirit of King Saul.” Stone makes clear that the gossipers are “in town,” and with those two words, she quickly positions the speaker and her family outside the town, in the country, the outskirts. The poem goes on to describe the speaker’s father like this:
Read More
“Arch-Talk” and the Postmodern Gall of Josh Bell and Mark Bibbins
By Keith Kopka
The term “postmodern” is tossed around a lot in the 21st century and has become an enigmatic umbrella. Visual art, architecture, television, and online media have all embraced the idea of the postmodern, and poetry is no exception. However, because of our culture’s ontological zeal to define things, postmodernism can often feel like a catchall. Any rough poetic beast that questions the formal order or unhinges its jaw around an “accepted” version of discourse has everyone running to sound the postmodern alarm bell.
But what does this label really mean for the poems to which we assign it? And what are the characteristics of successful postmodern poems that help them to stand out against the backdrop of modernity? Perhaps the lack of definitive answers to these questions is part of the used-car-salesman charm that is post-modernity. Still, this doesn’t stop writers from engaging with our cultural landscape to create voices and arguments in their work that would have seemed unlikely only twenty-five years ago.
However one feels about the idea of defining things by their temporal relationship to “modernity,” what can’t be denied is that this idea, despite all the debate, has become a quintessential aspect of the 21st century, and the poems that are the gems of this age handle their postmodern baggage with skill and grace. Two examples of this are Josh Bell’s “Epithalamion Ex Post Facto” (No Planets Strike, 2008) and Mark Bibbins’s “A Small Gesture of Gratitude” (They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, 2014). Doing more than simply rejecting the cultural hierarchies constructed by poets like Pound and Eliot, these poems, with their expert craftsmanship, leap between disparate thought and cultural interrogation: the poems play tennis with our expectations about what a poem should be.
Read More
The Present Deeply: The 21st-Century Love Poem
By Mario Chard
All the poems in new films set in the future are still the old poems. It means our visionaries of film are still looking to the past and not the present for lasting texts. And perhaps that says more about canonical texts needing time to rise above or drown in sand like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (the poem turned 200 this past January). But it also says something about the need for forums like this feature—space to speculate on those 21st-century poems bound to last. Here are two that I prophesy will make the list—Katherine Larson’s “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees” and Solmaz Sharif’s “Look.” Prophecy, I once heard a theologian say, is not about glimpsing the future. True prophecy is about seeing the present deeply.
First, the past (briefly): Shelley died four years after “Ozymandias” was published: 1822. That same year, Matthew Arnold was born—and so goes the cosmic balance. But today, Arnold’s most anthologized poem, “Dover Beach” (it turned 150 last year), more closely resembles Ozymandias the statue reduced to “trunkless legs of stone” than it resembles “Ozymandias” the poem. One reason why: Arnold follows his famous thesis that “The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full” but is now “withdrawing” and “retreating” with a sentimental turn he’d telegraphed earlier: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” In this poem of existential desperation, where two stand “as on a darkling plain” over which “ignorant armies clash by night,” the poet turns dramatically back to his love. But although the line and its move to stay destruction by the declaration of love are memorable, it can also read as a prop, a staged expression of passion to make a poetic point. But is there something else that troubles us?
Read MoreNew Ohio Review Issue 22. Originally printed Fall 2017.
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 22 compiled by Ali Nowac
Delectable Hazards at the Animal Dive
By Michael Chaney
By the time the cow set down the samosas, covering the spot where he’d earlier hooved his name, Fox seemed different to Pig.
“Simply marvelous,” Pig said with an air, trying to play it off.
Fox coughed. “May I have more water?” Annoyance puckered her auburn snout.
“Not a problem,” said the cow. “Mind if I brag about our wines?”
“Please do, darling.” Fox had a lovey-dovey way of talking. To Pig, she was not so different from the elegant junk in herringbone patterns on the walls: bugles, radios, troughs, collars, toys, and white puffy gloves. Read More
Hilltop Cemetery
The poem, “Hilltop Cemetery” by Brendan Cooney, originally appeared in NOR 22. It became the inspiration for this short film, by Bridie Jackson.
The Burden of Humans
By Michael Lavers
Featured Art: Midnight at Midsummer Over the Antarctic Mainland by Frederick A. Cook
The grass just has to wave, the birds just have
to sing. The grapes don’t wonder what light is;
the light just lights them, and the grapes grape back.
The golden oaks just shed their summer dresses
on the lawn—but you? You have to read
Spinoza in the garden while the light
is good. You have to keep your focus as
the motorcycles scream out of the purple hills.
You have to sweat, and laugh, and weatherproof
the bedroom windows, and remember
names and dates, the town where your parents met—
Milk River or Swan Hills?—and when they died,
you have to sweep the kitchen floor and then
define the good, the true, the beautiful,
or try, because azaleas can’t see themselves,
the squirrels are busy, and the ferns have closed.
The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose,
but in a language only you can read;
you have to know that all things pass and perish,
and that what you’ve said is finite, but continue—
as if grand exceptions might be made—
raking the leaves, stacking the wood, hoping
the child falls asleep against your chest,
hoping the blizzard swerves, knowing the wreckage
of the present will be gathered but
not soon, and not by you, because you’re in it,
there somewhere, under the sheet of snow.
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I’m Trying to Write a Joyful Poem
By Emily Mohn-Slate
Featured Art: Chrysanthemums by a Stream by Followers of Ogata Korin
after reading Ross Gay’s new book,
which makes me feel light
and giddy, like maybe
a world in which figs fall
from a city sky is possible,
but my poem becomes
about the collapse of long
love, how even the brightest
glint in the eye
becomes shadow eventually.
My son dances across
the room in a red
cowboy hat, he asks me
to chase him,
but the girl in the documentary
I watch lives in a landfill
outside Moscow—
she drinks water from
dirty milk jugs and—
why does joy always slide
into darkness?
My son laughs, his eight teeth
new and white, shining in the sun
while I tickle his belly.
Joy must be at least
as complicated as sorrow,
which is one reason
I hate those posed pictures
people take before
weddings, before babies,
hands clasped over the woman’s
belly—cupping warm skin
thinking they know
what’s inside.
First Train Ride Together: Northeast Corridor
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: Restoration work at the Reading Terminal and Market in the mid-1990s by Carol M. Highsmith
A procession of blessings
like incoming waves crowned with gold
like the beaches and marshes we passed
coming home
and another and another
as the light deepened and graced it all:
the water views, of course,
with shrink-wrapped boats in the marinas
and boat-lifts waiting in the cold;
but the train-side heaps of junk as well
the disappearing big box stores
the grimy buildings from another time.
Oh, see
the ice upheaved in inlets
both churning and silent at once!
and,
in intermittent moors and swales,
the high wooden platforms
the legislature appropriated funds for
duly topped with messy nests
the ospreys built last year.
If the birds aren’t grateful
for such civic thoughtfulness
I am
on their behalf. Thanks
to whom it may concern
for that; and for
the loveliness-conferring light out there
beyond your face. You
in the window seat turned toward me;
your face, and then Connecticut in glory.
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Zenyatta
By Grady Chambers
Featured Art: French Knight, 14th Century, by Paul Mercuri
Breeders’ Cup, November 2010
In a different life she wins.
In a different November in Kentucky she leans
into the last curve of the brown-combed track
as she passes the thick of the field. In that one,
in a bar far away, in our lucky coats
and muddy white sneakers, we rise
with the televised crowd as she quickens
at the flick of the jockey, as the grandstand churns
at the distance beginning to close, as the line comes closer.
And we know it as her rider leans forward,
as Zenyatta knows it in her legs
as the horse before her turns
and knows it’s over, the brown mane flying by
in a whip of color and dust, as the stands become a flicker
of white tickets, as her name is spoken skyward like a chant.
Ending the Poem
By Theresa Burns
Featured Art: Northern Lights over Iceland by Harald Moltke
Never on light or love.
Never, I’m told, on one of those
Poetry words like keening or wept.
Tears of any kind, in fact,
Are out, and even a rueful
Smile reads smug in the last line.
No small animals, or small
Hands, or anything especially
Beneficent. Don’t even think about
Children or old people. Or teenagers,
Lest they drive the poem
Into a ditch two blocks from home.
Nothing delicious or bitter.
Forget kisses and comeuppance,
As easily as you forget umbrellas
At parties; it’s not worth going back.
Don’t get moral. Nothing’s black
Or white in the end. Never
On silence. Or birdsong. Ever.
And the silence that utterly shadows
The yard at the end of birdsong?
I doubt it. Don’t be certain
About anything. Ask a question,
Leave a crumb, chase the tail
Of something down a black hole.
Just don’t make it black.
Make it that color at the throats
Of poppies, a kind of blue-gray black
Like crushed velvet. And feel it
Going down.
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Gentleman Caller
By Elton Glaser
So this is death come walking, looking mighty fine,
Him with a firm stride and a dragon-headed cane,
Dandy with diamonds in his smile, all howdy-do
And sweet potato pie, him strutting right up
To your own front door, that big stick knocking
On the frame and tapping his spats, making
The neighbors stare and the dogs back down,
Him idling under the hum of the porch light,
Spreading his shine wherever he pleases, sounding
A little cocky when he calls your name—
And what’s your mama gonna do about that?
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Clean For Him the Ashes
By David E. Yee
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Colm Tóibín
Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner
I remember watching the Cotton family’s kitchen burn, felt only a ripple of urgency. Knew it was the kitchen because the houses on this stretch are all the same split-levels built north of Ellicott City, the semi-rural bit just past 70—two main avenues laced together by branches of side streets, neighborhoods pocketed along them. I kept waiting for the flames to reach out like arms through the windows, but there were just these little tips of orange licking the gutter. Our plots were far enough apart that the heat didn’t warp my siding, but the pungent smell of that old wood burning, the paint peeling, felt toxic, jarred me from an otherwise peaceful Monday night.
Firefighters got it out in five. I had my face in the blinds, shifted to see the Cottons—father, mother, two boys—standing shoeless in the grass. It was warm for a September evening, but they huddled, heads tipped skyward as the tail of the smoke crept up past the alder trees lining our backyards. The Chief handed Mr. Cotton a phone, and he just stared at it like he was waiting for a call, didn’t dial, gave it back to the Chief when he was done talking to his crew. The crowd of neighbors gathered on the opposite curb began to thin as the trucks pulled away, and I went back to dusting my living room.
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Waitress in an All-Night Diner, West Virginia
By Rebecca Baggett
Featured Art: A small portion of the Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove on one side of Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Old Mammoth Road by Carol M. Highsmith
Angels visit sometimes, close to dawn.
They cluster by the door, seem to scan the cars
as they turn in, as if waiting for something—
what, she doesn’t have a clue.
She’s forty-three, a bad cough (first cigarette
at fourteen), two divorces, a dragonfly tattoo
on her left shoulder blade. Tumble
of chestnut curls—not a gray hair yet—
imprisoned in a net, magnificent when released.
Terrible feet. She hasn’t told a soul
about the angels, not even her sister,
who knows everything else worth telling.
They aren’t as glorious as she’d imagined.
Their wings, in particular—tight-folded
against their backs—surprise her by their drabness,
dusty-brown as the sparrows that hop around
the parking lot and gorge on stale biscuits
she crumbles on her break. The angels’ eyes—
washed-out blues and greens with strange,
cat-like pupil-slits—track her as she winds
through tables, a pot of coffee in each hand,
or delivers platters heaped with pancakes, sausages,
fries.
Why me? she wonders,
her back tickling under their eerie gaze,
but can’t imagine. Until the night the boy—
he can’t be more than boy yet—plunges
through the door, white as biscuit dough
except two spots, fever-red, high on either cheek.
The pistol he grips trembling with every
shuddering breath.
The cook’s whistling an old Alabama tune
she almost recognizes. The trucker
in the back booth drops his toast, lunges
to his feet. The pistol wavers toward him,
and then the angel by the door lifts its hand
to beckon her. She feels her lips curl
into the smile she offers worn-out mothers,
fractious teens, men who look as though
they can’t endure another night alone.
Yanks off the net. Shakes down her waterfall
of hair. Takes the first step
toward whatever’s come to her.
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Bag Lady Muse
By Rebecca Baggett
My muse is an old bag lady,
who turns up every morning, grocery cart
heaped with rubber boots, starfish,
hula hoops, ruby vases, tattered children’s
books, ballet slippers, rhinestone pins,
and a fur stole with a fox head at one end,
expecting me to make a poem.
What am I supposed to do
with all this random crap? I ask.
Did I mention that one wheel
of her cart is catawampus, so it makes
a loud kerchunk kerchunk
as she maneuvers it up my drive
and into my living room, where she
insists on parking?
She shrugs, slumps into the recliner,
lights a cigarette.
It’s your life,
lamb. I’m just collecting it.
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Laundromat
By Ted Kooser
Although it’s abandoned at two in the morning,
an empty white carton of buzzing fluorescence,
there’s always the feeling that someone was there
until only a moment before you walked in,
someone who reached up and popped a soap bubble
of fragrance, the last shimmer of color afloat
in this otherwise colorless storefront, then strolled past
the choir of top-loaders and opened their lids,
leaving them open, each of them holding its breath
before singing, two dollars in quarters per song.
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The Clipper Ship
By Ted Kooser
Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer
There was a cheaply framed clipper flying in full sail
over the sofa, and it leaned just a little into the glass
as if to look down on me lying there bored, and it carried
more sail than anything in Iowa. It looked as if some boy
had broken a lot of white cups and saucers and stacked up
the pieces, just so, so they wouldn’t fall off of the sill
of that window that opened onto a faraway sea, a sea
that the ship had only recently ripped open, revealing
the world’s white cotton lining. That overstuffed sofa
was heavy and brown like a barge, and it smelled like
the one suit in my grandfather’s closet, an angry blue
like the sea in the picture, and as I lay there, climbing
the main mast’s springy rigging onto a lofty spar
where I could look down on myself, I could see the sofa
slowly sinking, the carpet all patterned with flotsam
slapping against it, and I wondered, as one might wonder,
if the ship would ever arrive in time to save me, or if I,
hanging high in the rigging, would simply wave it on.
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Hilltop Cemetery
By Brendan Cooney
Featured Art: River Village in a Rainstorm by Lu Wenying
How many of you said,
“How I prayed for the day to pass quickly.”
How many said,
“I didn’t care about the result
even if I did achieve it.”
How many of you said,
“I dreamed of making them like me,
if only for my elevation of thought
and unmistakable wit.”
How many of you said,
“I was ridiculously exaggerating the facts,
but how could I help it?”
How many said,
“I could not control myself and
was already shaking with fever.”
Who said,
“Then followed three years of gloomy memories.”
Did anyone say,
“If it’s gonna be shame, bring it;
if it’s gonna be disgrace, I’ll take it;
if it’s gonna be degradation, welcome;
the worse it is, the better.”
How many of you said,
“Strangeness is not a vice.”
How many said,
“I needed a friend, so much.”
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Delectable Hazards at the Animal Dive
By Michael Chaney
Featured Art: Chinese painting featuring two birds on a flowering tree branch
By the time the cow set down the samosas, covering the spot where he’d earlier hooved his name, Fox seemed different to Pig.
“Simply marvelous,” Pig said with an air, trying to play it off.
Fox coughed. “May I have more water?” Annoyance puckered her auburn snout.
“Not a problem,” said the cow. “Mind if I brag about our wines?”
“Please do, darling.” Fox had a lovey-dovey way of talking. To Pig, she was not so different from the elegant junk in herringbone patterns on the walls: bugles, radios, troughs, collars, toys, and white puffy gloves.
“I don’t drink,” Fox said, touching the waiter’s hoof. It was gentle. His bell never so much as whispered as she did it. Anyone else would have gotten a bray from all four of his stomachs, Pig was thinking, distracted by the samosas. Their crispy folds smuggled the aroma of mudzhki, the kind Pig’s grandsow used to make with cabbage and sweet layings. Read More
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