Author: newohioreviewonlineissues

Experiment. Kathryn Cowles. Metal, treadmill, buttons, psychiatrists, the artist. 2014

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Cowles

Featured Art: Hawkin’s Machine for writing and drawing

I must be present in the gallery
7 hours a day 7 days a week
with 25 minutes for lunch.
Water is always available to me in a tube
extended from the ceiling.
I have bolted to the wall and floor behind me
long, thin iron spikes like the ones
in the dungeon of the castle in the film
with the handsome anthropologist
when the floor breaks away and he falls
and his length of rope, hastily tied
around his middle
is just shorter than
the distance to
the longest of the long spikes.
The psychologists in the corner
in the white coats and with their clipboards
are part of the art piece,
though they fancy themselves to be
conducting an experiment.

The children who visit the gallery
are often cruel, though in the way
a winter is cruel, without intention.
They have visited the natural history museum
where a button lights up a portion
of the exhibit on
quadrupeds of the Sierra.
They are merely experimenting with cause and effect.
So they push each button in turn
just to try them out
and I am glad when they leave.
Most people only push up to 3
and then laugh uncomfortably and push 1 again.
Some people never go past 1.

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Heart 2. Kathryn Cowles. Mixed media (tuning forks, megaphones, windmill, catapult, volcano, bathtub, confettied heart, tissue-paper flowers, flamethrowers, pianos, etc.) 2014

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Kathryn Cowles 

after The Way Things Go, by Peter Fischli
and David Weiss

I give the boot on a stick a push.
                                                          The boot circles round and kicks the light switch on, which, as the open bulb grows hot, melts the balloon full of red red paint, which drips down to fill up the glass precariously balanced until it tips over and breaks, tripping a wire on its way down,
                                                                                                                            and the wire sends a spoon attached to a little weighted car down a ramp, and the spoon hits against strategically placed tuning forks in different notes as it travels down, and the tuning forks are each pointed toward a red and white megaphone set at full volume, and the megaphones serve to amplify the little 12-note tune that I can’t get out of my head,
           and when the spoon car gets to the bottom of the ramp, it smacks into a striped target, which knocks a red bowling ball onto an oversized inflated black plastic bag, which releases its air into a long silver tube in a burst, causing the white canvas windmill at the other end of the tube to turn, which tips the wooden seesaw structure so that it releases its 1,000 one-inch rubber balls in various shades of red and pink and gray and black down a 25-foot wooden plank, and then into a metal chute, where they line up and twist and turn their way, roller-coaster-like, to the bottom of the track, picking up speed all the while,
                                                                                                                                                                   and at the bottom, they split into two tracks and collect in two separate tubs attached to two separate strings that will only pull once enough balls have accumulated in the tubs, given enough weight, one string attached to a trip wire attached to an oversized match, which quickly strikes against its measure of sandpaper and lights on fire, and the other string attached to the safety catch of a tightened, loaded bow above it,
                                                                                                                                                                   and the string slowly, slowly, as the waiting match burns down, as the tub fills with one-inch balls, slowly pulls at the safety catch until it, quite suddenly,
                                                                releases, letting loose the paraffin-soaked arrow, which passes through the flame of the oversized match and lights up as it shoots just feet above the heads of the seated spectators in the outdoor garden of the art museum, over, across the open space, grazing on the other side of the crowd a wick attached to the paraffin-soaked cardboard mannequin,
                                                                                                                                        which bursts into a flame that lights all the attached oversized sparklers from their shortened bases, and they burn in reverse, outward, and the mannequin sags, and the mannequin gets infinitesimally lighter, as the sparklers drop their ash to the ground and as the chemicals react and burn away, so that the enormous and sensitive scale holding the sparklered mannequin on one side becomes outweighed by the enormous pile of inflated red balloons on the platform on the other side of the scale and slowly lifts into the air,
                                                                                                                               and a metal ball rolls in a track along the edge of the platform and catches in a pocket on one end of a wooden plank,
                                                                                                                                                        causing the giant catapult full of red-dyed baking soda on the other end of the wooden plank to fling its contents in the air and, upon hitting the vat of red-dyed vinegar in the center of the giant papier-mâché model of a volcano, to bubble up over the edge and through a rugged papier-mâché channel painted to look like rock on the side of the volcano,
                            and the fake lava flows into a water wheel, which turns and turns, and the turning untwists a 50-foot length of rope from around a pole high above the crowd, out on the end of a crane,
                                                                                                                                                                    and the pole is attached to the side of a bathtub full of confetti made from hole-punching-to-pieces every letter or postcard you ever sent me every photograph I have of you every scrap of film every original thing every only-copy-that-exists and that might hurt to lose,
                                                                                         and the bathtub turns,
                                                                                                   and turns on its pole,
                                                                                                                       and upends its contents onto the crowd
as 12 pianos each tuned to a single note drop in succession,
                                                                                                         a literal kind of surround
sound,
          playing the little tune I can’t get out of my head,
                                                                                           as confetti cannons shoot red
tissue-paper flowers into the air,
                                                    as the tissue-paper flowers pass through the blaze
of the four flamethrowers, strategically placed,
                                                                                    as they light one after the other and burn completely to ash before landing gently and harmlessly alongside the confetti on the heads and shoulders of the crowd in the art museum garden 50 feet below.

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Cedar Waxwing, Late November

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Hazard

Featured Art: Flying magpies by Watanabe Seitei

In the crook of a bare maple branch
a lone cedar waxwing sits. I thought
they went south, but I guess not all, not yet.

There are big blue holes in the clouds today
and only a moderate chill, a day to be sociable—
and waxwings tend toward groups.

But there he sits, no berry calling him,
nor women, nor daring flights among thickets.
His high-pitched note is mute.

The breast of the cedar waxwing looks softer
than anything I’ve seen. No one’s discerned
a single feather etched in the fuzz

of his tan-gold-gray. That black mask
is a clown’s toy, more dandy than bandit.
Small orange beads dangle on his wingtips,

and look how the buff-gray tail concludes
in black and lemony stripes. But what good
is all that art on the eve of winter, this bird left

with his choice to stay put, and only me
to impress? I’ve heard that waxwings in courtship
pass fruit and bugs back and forth. They dance

and finish with a gentle touching of beaks.
Maybe my lone bird is lookout for his tribe,
or decoy—their offering to any hawk he can’t deceive.

December’s shouldering in, and here we are,
me wondering, him staring. His feathers fluff
in a bit of wind. Some twigs fall. We see each other.

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Topology

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Christine Gosnay

The universe expands understandably
because of its many edges, twisting

Its edges are everywhere and everywhere
are its edges

The cracked dial on the gas hob is the edge,
the blind kitten’s black ear,

All the earth’s hotbeaten glass, the belt
around my father’s neck,

And so forth, such as the limits of plotted expressions
and the cores of galaxies.

Edges. Tearing, however,
isn’t allowed.

It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center
where my stomach, pale and useful, longs,

Pulling as if at a doll’s string to say ache
in a bright, unrecognizable voice,

I move my mind by the hand from the dark blue room
where it is thinking-feeling

Toward the edge of the blank graph
where it does its knowing-thinking,

A place where, like honey, time passes down glass
in delightful, jagged spiros,

sensibly different,
undifferently arranged.

Understandably, in this way, because of the infinite corners
where, shot with longing, longing springs,

I discover myself holding a small yellow book of mathematics
in one hand,

the fullness of my sunlit skin in the other.

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Yesterday, Northern Michigan, Interstate 75

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Hazard

Featured Art: Historic window detail, Port Huron, Michigan by Carol M. Highsmith

Four times today the bee has banged
his head against my window.
He wants erotic pollen and thinks
he smells it here, the indoor side of glass.

These days people say madness
is expecting something new
from old behavior. So this must be
a lunatic bee—bad wiring or bad parents,
the bad apple, the not-our-kind-of
bee. In the corner of my eye,
like a floater, but more sudden,
he breaks left and attacks the window,
throbbing with what he must have.

Yesterday in northern Michigan the blue sky
unzipped itself and let a swallow fall, fast,
beak first, so straight it seemed
he’d aimed for asphalt, saw a bug there,
had to have it. The bird bounced once,
twenty yards ahead. I had to steer
a little left to clear the body.

This May’s been cool and wet, such a daily, fresh
dawn breath that the season and the trees
did not expect it. Only crazy animals expect,

like bees, or a swallow lit gold in morning sun,
heading for his usual spot on a white pine branch
only two lanes east, where the world was
what he remembered and desired.

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My Lifelong Relationship with God

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Julie Hanson 

Featured Art: blurred photo of a church in a remote area

We have not spoken for nearly thirty years.
It’s difficult to remember the precise moment when something stops.
I tried to quit smoking so many times, for example,
that I don’t know the date of my success.
I still like the same sensations I did as a girl in the 1950s.
Sun on my shoulder, a breeze on the nape of my neck.
Pulling the cotton laces of canvas shoes tight to tie them.
Losing myself in the thicket of a book.
The way my torso and limbs and neck feel after swimming.
Stirring with a wooden spoon. Hearing the wooden spoon
against the side of the bowl. Yards that invite a body
to run down the hill. Things that fit together.

Some did not want it to unfold as it did, but I came to be nonetheless.
We needn’t grow quiet now.
We all have had plans that are cancelled and plans that are not.
We all know that what disappoints isn’t always due to us.
If replacing God with another phrase would work, I would do it.
It would not be love, however. It would not be God is Love.
God is Love is like trying to climb up a string instead of a ladder.
When I count my blessings, and they are many,
I consider them as much or as little my fault as anyone else’s.
That it rains today, that I wrote something down,
that I was born in June when we have peas and lettuce
in the garden. If we have planted them. If we know how to do that.
If the yard has a garden. If a yard with a garden appealed
to our younger selves. If the groundhog has not found a way in.
If the owl in the oak does its work.

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The Getaway

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Rebecca McClanahan

Featured Art: Haverstraw Bay by Sanford Robinson Gifford

“Is that our car?” my mother asks. She has rolled her walker over to the window and is pointing to the Buick LeSabre parked outside their condo. I keep it there so that Dad can see it from his recliner, where he spends most of his days and evenings. He hasn’t driven for several years and never will again, but he likes knowing the car is there, likes sitting in the co-pilot seat when I take them for doctor appointments or Sunday drives. The Buick has rarely moved from the space in the three years since my husband and I relocated them from Indiana, to a condo twenty feet from our own. But each day is a new day for my mother; thus, the question, which she will keep asking until I answer.

“Yes, Mother. That’s your car.”

“Mine?” Her brown eyes light up, her eyebrows lift.

“Yours and Dad’s.”

“Dad’s?”

“Paul’s, I mean.” Lately I’ve been trying to break my lifelong habit of calling my dad “Dad.” “Dad” only encourages her confusion: that her husband is her father, or sometimes her grandfather. No matter that her father has been dead nearly thirty years and her grandfather, over seventy. She still sometimes sets a place for them at the table, and worries when they’re late for dinner.

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Laundry

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia by William James Glackens

This morning, doing the laundry,
smoothing collars and shirt plackets
before placing it all in the dryer,
I saw the ghost of my recently dead mother,
her red-capillaried face looking on
approvingly in the steam.

I didn’t expect to see her,
and some of this must be pretend,
but she was there, making a place for herself
over by the baskets, in the light
that fell through the windows
at an angle that never seemed to change.

We got to talking—who doesn’t want
to talk with the dead again
when it’s morning and mostly sunny?—
about the telephone pole in our old backyard,
and the sound of the pulleys and ropes
that carried the wash in and out.

I was lingering over the way a drying sheet
took in a breeze and released it
as if it were breathing,
but my mother chattered away non-stop,
moving as she always did, from topic
to topic without transition,

only pausing here and there to punctuate
with one of her sayings—
Doing the wash makes you happy.
It says you can begin again.
And unlike when she was alive
that seemed true. As the light’s angle

sharpened, none of our mistakes,
our fights or failures, the old
argument about Dad—or even
the ridiculous, proper way
to fold a bottom sheet—held us back
as we finished the first load of darks.

And by the time she held a shirt
by the shoulders, folded it in thirds,
then flipped the bottom half under the top
and laid it in the pile for the living,
I was whistling, caught up entirely
in the rhythm and pace of our task.

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At Milward Funeral Home, Lexington, KY

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Bloemenzee by Theo van Hoytema

Someone has to identify the body.
The funeral facilitator, Jeanne,
gestures me into the room and clicks
the door shut behind me.

You finally got your wish,
I say to my mother.
She’s wearing a shade of lipstick
that unbecomes her, a subtle peach
she would have hated. Her face
is her face and of course is not,
her hair parted in the middle,
a new look. Her hands, composed
across her sternum, are the color
of parchment, skin thin as vellum.

I don’t stroke her arm. I don’t kiss
her forehead, as I thought I would.
Instead, I wonder, oddly, if the funeral
people use the same gorgeous quilt
that covers my mother now,
with its sunbursts and bluebirds,
for everybody.

When I think I have stayed long enough,
Brahms trailing off in the corners,
Jeanne is sitting outside the door,
her long fingers forming a steeple.
I want to say to her I have no idea
who that is, I’m sorry, but levity
isn’t encouraged here. Although
I would only be speaking the truth:
Alzheimer’s riddled her brain
and sucked the marrow from her spirit;
she became a stranger and a stranger
to herself. What else was there to do
but believe along with her that Hoss
and his Bonanza brothers were indeed
aliens from another planet, that Pat Sajak
was “in on it,” along with everyone else
who came and went in Mom’s room,
stealing her clothes, her makeup,
the nursing home grand conspiracy . . .

I’m sorry it’s taking me so long,
Mom said in a rare lucid moment
last week, and I had nothing to say,
and I tugged the blanket snugly
under her chin, and I handed her
the plastic cup full of water which
she waved away.

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The Last Father Poem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By William Varner

Featured Art: Design for a Heart-shaped Box by Noritake Factory

Only the spittle
of AM radio in your car
those few times we met,
a swinging air freshener,
cigarettes little twisted
arms in the ashtray.
The waitress in the diner
brought coffee
and checked on us
too many times,
her apron the color
of the dried mustard
near the cap.
And I’ve forgotten
where the cemetery is,
on which street I looked away
as Amish buggies slowed,
and the men took off their black hats,
held them to their chests,
and gave a short, sharp nod.

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Meditation On My 44th Birthday

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jason Irwin

Before going for a walk, I open the day’s newspaper.
NASA releases detailed photos of Charon,
Pluto’s largest moon. In a marketplace in Diyala Province, Iraq,
a suicide bomber kills one hundred and twenty.
On this day in 1959, Billie Holiday died
handcuffed to her hospital bed. My horoscope
tells me I will be extremely serious and earnest
in my emotions, that I will suffer
from the ailments of birds.

                                        Hard to believe half of my life
is just some thing that used to be.

On my walk I stop at the corner of Maple
and Elm, watch the sun sink behind the station,
I think about Charon, orbiting Pluto, and the Charon
who ferried the souls of the dead to the underworld. Maybe
he delivered the people killed in the marketplace,
or Lady Day. Instead of a coin for passage
she sang Baby why stop and cling to some fading
thing that used to be. Her lilting voice trailing off
as they reached the far shore.

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46 Years Old

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Skolfied 

Featured Art: Pine Tree by Giovanni Segantini

I’m not really sure how I got to 46.
If I think about it, I could probably
come up with a dozen years, two dozen
if I include sleep or staring into space
and one more year with worrying
about the wild flax and campion
which never once needed me to do
more than mow around them.
The rest of it, who knows.
I don’t have a smartphone.
I don’t do a ton of zesting.
I will admit, there were some books
along the way and a few parking tickets.
I voted. Oh, how I voted. Tracy, I’d say,
tell me who’s running for school board
and how to vote. And she’d tell me—
that took up more of the 46 years than
you’d think. Good grief, Tracy, I’d say.
Just write down their initials for me.
Write it on my hand, so I won’t forget.
I am not writing on your hand, she’d say.
So I wrote her in as a candidate,
just so she’d have something to do
in the cordage of her own years.
The time spent touching Heather’s
bobbleheads—that adds up. Breaking down
cardboard boxes for my father-in-law.
This still won’t sum to 46, even with all
the pretzels and the time asking waiters
for mustard in a ketchup world.
Okay, the sporting events. Sometimes,
woooo, the cheering, and other times
all the play’s at your net and third period
goes on forever. More than a smidge
of my 46 years has been spent in ice rinks.
Is no one interested in clearing the zone?
The whistle works both ways, ref!
Yeah, I might have yelled that more
than once. How long does this guy
think I have, waiting for a good call?

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Lunatic, Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel Rinehart 

Featured Art: Trees on a Rocky Hillside by Asher Brown Durand

Sometimes, seeking desperately the measure
of her weeks, she dresses now for church
on Tuesdays or Saturdays, slides sideways
into the slick interior of the Oldsmobile.

So familiar the route, the car seems to know it,
nosing its gentle way like some peculiar
land-bound fish, and she leans in its belly
as it makes its one wide turn before the church.

But dim, the sanctuary withholds its promise.
She sits in the pew, hymnal poised, waiting
for the organ to thunder out
of its immaculate, peepless slumber.

Churchgoers flit in her periphery,
but she cannot fix them. The long dead
lingering beside her flee when she turns
to greet them. Even the eyes of Christ

flash impenetrable in the soft flush
of stained glass. Lunatic, time loops and tangles,
doubles back on itself. Somewhere in the hours
the pastor appears, or the woman

who fills the candles. They call up her son
to collect her. Behind the scrim at her windows
she baffles in the horrors of her dotage.
Someone has moved her husband’s truck.

It has been only days and decades since he slumped
dead against the dash in a hay-flecked shirt.
The chicken coop, too, is missing, the pasture fence.
Vagrant memory, like livestock loosed over the plain.

Always night obliterates. In the morning
she will gather her pocketbook and go again
to church, searching still for some low-lit beacon
to mark her faltering way toward the long home.

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Sometimes the Mother Eats Her Young

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Rachel Cochran
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest selected by Phillip Lopate

I. Snakes

My parents divorce when I’m five, maybe six, at which point Mom takes the three of us and leaves the state, sardine-packs the whole (broken) family unit into the spare room of her parents’ place in Dallas, where she learns a new routine. Works at an ice cream shop. Avoids the kitchen phone when Dad calls each Saturday morning at 9:00. Cries most nights. (We learn to sleep over it.) She dates around, first a guy named Laslie, who takes us to the rodeo, and whose apartment I walk into one day to find that he’s napping naked on the couch. It’s the first naked man I’ve ever seen in person, and it strikes me that the space between his legs looks strangely melted, folded, mottled pink like ground meat. There’s another guy named Andy, the recently divorced brother of my grandparents’ across-the-street neighbor. Andy takes us to a theme park, gives us a day full of sweat and sky and sticky candy. Days later, in the toy aisle of a Family Dollar, my sister shakes a Magic 8-Ball, still in its packaging, and asks it, “Is Mom going to marry Laslie?”

Don’t count on it.

“Is Mom going to marry Andy?”

It is certain.

She marries Andy when he asks, and we follow him down to the Gulf, pile into a spare room at his parents’ place this time, even smaller than the first one (We learn to take up less space.)

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There Was a Young Woman With Cancer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: In the Spirit of Hoffmann by Paul Klee

With each remission she’d take it up again,
her search for proof her great love Edward Lear
was influenced by the Irish poet Mangan,
and while we weeded she would bend my ear
with her latest evidence: an owl here,
elsewhere a pussycat or a beard, a wren.
I was polite, but it was pretty thin.
There was one word, though,
some nonsense confabulation that occurred
in Mangan first, so odd that it could not
be accident. Then cancer, like a weed
we’d missed, some snapped-off root or dormant seed.
The last cure killed her. I would give a lot
to be able to recall that word.

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Ode to Texting

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: Gray landline telephone on a wooden wall by Markus Spiske

Blowdart,
breath-message,
needle so fine
you penetrate even
the defensive hide
of sons,
excite reply.

In yourself
innocent,
language gnat,
midge,
mosquito,
but driving
distracted herds
over death cliffs.

The phone call
is a drunk uncle
barging in,
uninvited,
to slump
on the sofa,

and even e-mail
is a volume
of Trollope
for an elevator ride,
while you
are a wife’s light hand
on the sleeve
mid-party,
two words
barely suspending
the conversation.

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And Another Thing

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: Still Life with Violin by William Harnett

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats and my fingers
bending into little arcs of stone and I’m thinking
of some way to annihilate her phone invisibly
maybe with a squint of my eye and how lovely
to imagine the stark O of her mouth
her pretty hands holding nothing but the air
I allow her to breathe O most merciful zapper
that I’ve become father-confessor for all her sins
committed impending unthought-of
her stubborn knees bent to the spectacle
of my very unblind justice which I’d like to take
on tour now-and-then accosting scofflaws
speedsters unholy maître d’s smug
people of all sorts and let’s not forget
the dry cleaner who’s ruined my favorite shirt
through some occult chemical mishap
and of course this woman sitting next to me
whose soft knit-covered ribs I’m trying hard
not to jab my elbow into but she’s smiling now
as if she’d rather be here than anywhere else
riffing with the pianist moving her hips in time

and okay, maybe her lateness wasn’t her fault
maybe her husband needed a significant operation
maybe it was poor Aunt Lavinia texting her
that the vicious dog she heard at the door
was really her own little Shnoozy,
and shouldn’t I maybe introduce myself to her
say what a grand concert this has been judging
from the thunderous standing ovation
everyone’s giving the band including me

though didn’t the set-list seem so short
did they at least play “Splenectomy Blues”
or “Dry Bone Breakdown” and why are we
all filing out when there’s so much more
to be mulled over like an old song of the heart
you’ve carried with you a long time
but can barely hear above all the noise.

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You Are My Sunshine

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alpay Ulku

Featured Art: Landscape by Paul Nash

We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.

You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.

How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?

Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.

Everyone tenses and ignores him.

It’s my dream to be a paid musician.

A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.

Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.

The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.

It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.

The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.

Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.

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On Rereading Madame Bovary at Forty

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Erin Redfern

Featured Art: The Book of Light by Odilon Redon

Finally we got to read a book
with a woman’s name––your name.
One of the greats, our teacher said.

At fifteen I could not scorn
your far-flung, dark-horse longings.
I saw in you a girl like me seeking

something big as love.
I didn’t know you were Gustave’s
femme mâché, surrogate

for bourgeois greed, excuse
for risqué docudrama,
trumped-up thing riffling open

for anyone’s leisure.
And did he put some body
English on you! Your dainty

feet, your frothy knickers,
your India-ink eyes––
wordless telegraphs

vaulting everyone’s crumbling
moral breastwork.
He made you, mistress,

delectable, then grilled you
over an open flame
of quick trysts and heartbreak.

Read More

Happiness

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Daniel Arias-Gomez

Sometimes it sneaks up on me, as I look out the window
of a bus, for example, and see a woman in huaraches running
in the rain—her right arm waving, her left
hand pulling a boy, a backpack bumping
against his shoulders. The woman opens
her mouth, but I only hear rain
against the glass—a black braid lashes
her neck, and from her arm
dangle two mesh bags with a plaid pattern
woven out of strands of plastic and filled with vegetables, beans, rice. My mother
used those same bags when we went to the market on Sundays. One day
she bought me a bag all for myself, the same
as hers but smaller, in which I dropped
tangerines, peanuts, mazapanes, as I followed her
through market stalls. The bus driver sees
the woman and the boy in time
and stops—her face loosens, and she smiles,
and her smile takes in all the rain
and all the mud on the street and on her huaraches, and she turns
to the boy and says
something to him,
and he smiles back.

Read More

A Brief History of Hunger

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Up from the mire of the primordial soup
came one-celled, tiny cavernous bits
whose innards knew a hollow ache only cured
when their shape-shifting borders engulfed
smaller bits, and came a world more complicated,
the paramecium with its oral groove,
the surprising planaria—nick its frontispiece
and the split becomes two hungry heads!—
then came, as ever, competition begetting variation,
to move or not to move, that was the question—
whether it was more propitious to see
with eyes multitudinous or on stalks or both,
whether it was better to be safely anchored,
waiting in camouflage, or to mount an assault,
evolution’s choices simple, almost biblical—seek
and ye shall find or lurk with bait in the hope that all
will come to him who waits, and then came
specialized beaks and teeth, fanciful horns
and coloration prompting procreation,
as well as a multitude of eating adaptations—
the water bird’s fused nostrils, air sacs in head and neck
to absorb impact as the feathered darts, pillaging
angels, plummet—and came homo sapiens with a myriad
of tastes and ways to cook—sear and braise, sauté
and soufflé, pickle and brine—came table manners, the urge
to gorge, to purge, came sorbet and gourmet, foods
delectable and indigestible, epicurean delights, food fights,
and all the ravenous mouths of tomorrow and tomorrow.

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The Oregon Trail

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Corey Van Landingham

Featured Art: Wooden fence with two black buffaloes by Markus Spiske

When my first boyfriend’s mother died of breast cancer, I spoke with him on the cordless, from the bathtub, trying to console him. He was calm in his grief, and I broke his heart soon after. A cruelty only vaguely acceptable at fourteen. A week before we had snuck out, in the middle of the night, and driven up the snaking mountain roads of southern Oregon. Toward what? Toward something. We could feel a pull all around us, the silence in the woods, the ghosts of the Shasta people passing below our windows.

What did we know of love? Across the screen, in the dark computer labs of our youth where we played The Oregon Trail on our soon-to-be-extinct Apple II computers, love was entering in the names of those you wanted to take with you, west, toward the promised land. We could all begin a new life together, if we purchased the right supplies. Unless we were in a particularly harsh environment, we knew to conduct a brief funeral. Here lies Laura. We wrote epitaphs across the virtual tombstones before continuing down the trail.

Read More

Evening With Little Comfort

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Caitlin Vance

Featured Art: Heron in snow by Ohara Koson

8 p.m. and an even-ing out of the world’s darkness
I’d like to escape. I take comfort in headlights,

phone screens, a busy lawyer’s lamp still on
through the office window. Small resistances

to night’s tyranny. I take comfort in a heavy glass
filled with ice which catches glimmers of light

like wedding rings. There’s comfort in walking down the sidewalk
where matches flicker and last season’s tinsel hangs

on tree branches in a shop window, there’s comfort
in the glitter painted on the eyelids of a drunk woman,

and the voices of strangers saying look at that moon.
At home I lure a firefly in through my window.

My green-eyed cat chases it and scrapes her teeth
against its little light-bulb tail, so all that’s left

to flicker are her eyes and mine and not
the firefly’s tiny dead eyes, gone dark.

My cat goes to sleep. I climb into bed, lower
my eyelids, burn out my last little lamps, surrender.

Read More

Where the Stars Are Hived

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James Lineberger 
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest selected by Rosanna Warren

Featured Art: Beautiful woman portrait from Messiah by Samuel Johnson, LL.D

That Saturday, when The ABC’s
of Beekeeping arrived UPS,
he was already a very sick man, survivor
of several major surgeries, all of which were
successful, within limits, but what
could they do, all those
doctors and technicians, to halt the inevitable, which
he knew, of course, we all do, even in those
moments of temporary triumph
when we feel we have won something or other, when
that dratted parathyroid thing
gets plucked and dropped in the bucket, the scar artfully
hidden in a crease of skin, or the triple bypass pains have subsided
and become one of those historical blips
on the mind-screen, these and all the others
will have taken their toll, but when the book arrived
he was nonetheless grateful, knowing full well
he would never get around to the bees or a score
of other projects, but the pride was still there, and some
stubborn sense of accomplishment
that had nothing to do with the rest of his life, the marriages,
the lawyers, the pre-nuptials, and the money,
the money, all that goddamn money, and what did it mean,
any of it, next to this hillside filled with row
upon row of Silver Queen, and the praying mantids
and ladybugs, the chalcid wasps and the pungent
scent of the marigolds, how to speak
of these things or make anyone understand that the garden
is not a weapon against Death,
but a doorway to invite her in, a private place
where they can talk undisturbed
with a growing closeness and affection he never
dreamed possible,
he and this little girl in her denim coveralls with
the bear appliqué and the bottoms
rolled up, the way she holds his fingers in her tiny hand, and her shining face,
upturned, her lips parted in a daughter’s trusting smile.

Read More

Convocation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Hot air balloon by James Nisbet & Co.

Perhaps you’ll find it strange
you no longer appear in my dreams,
but on the other hand
it may serve
to fuel your belief that I never loved you
at all, that we were little
more than a scattering of pixels
in the ether,
the kind of momentary disturbance
a thrush will make
stabbing its bill into the leaves
and tossing them
about in search of food, shaking its head
to clear away the debris
and take whatever sustenance the god of thrushes
has promised
before the world settles back again,
asleep in the wake of a need
more primal than heaven and hell;
yet even when I think of us in that sense, as only
the leftovers at some Olympian event where we were not guests,
but mere canapés, nibbled at
and tossed aside,
left in the dead grass for worms to eat,
still it seems that even
birds and grubs, yea, our very comminuted dust, are cursed
with the memory
of a time when nothing could ever
go wrong,
and we knew all the words to every song.

Read More

My Mother’s Neck

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Suhr

Trailer parks as a winding tire swing,
              as Zigzags and a one-dollar wine cooler.
                             Trailer parks as an ice cube in sweet tea.

Trailer parks as a drunk dad on a dirt bike,
              and that chunk of flesh gone from his head.
                             Trailer parks as a shatter, as a fist, as a scream.

Black–Camaro trailer parks.
              Black Sabbath, black leash.
                             Ticks-on-the-dog trailer parks.

Fingers-in-a-pussy trailer parks.
              Good-Lord-Grant-us-Grace trailer parks.
                             Trailer parks as Dad who called me shithead.

Naked-Barbie trailer parks,
              Moon-Pies and Welch’s Grape Soda.
                             I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.

Fish-smoker trailer parks.
              Pot-in-a-closet trailer parks.
                             An aluminum shed full of porn.

Trailer parks as loose underwear,
              lawn mattresses, CoverGirl.
                             Trailer parks as half a box of tree ornaments,

as a repossessed Ford Taurus (cream),
              as a shatter, a fist, a scream.
                             Trailer parks as cans of peas.

Piss-in-a-5-gallon-bucket trailer parks,
              cinderblocks and plywood.
                             Trailer parks as three shredded tires.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.
              Wild poppies growing alongside weeds,
                             and that police photo of Mom’s choked neck.

Unpaid-propane-bill, cold-water trailer parks.
              Trailer parks as a grip, a gasp, a little hand on a loaded gun.

                             A-phone-call-from-jail trailer parks.

Read More

Maintenance

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By David Gullette

Listen,
            while you were over ogling ogives and trefoils,
                                                                                           chancels and bays,
the things you left behind were quietly giving up,
flying to pieces, falling apart almost together.
            That grinding whine up front you thought was brakes failing?
It was, but that’s not all:
            the last shred of resistance is gone from the shocks,
            every bump is now like the thump of a flawed heart,
but that’s not all:
            the tires have gone slick and bland in your absence,
            unevenly worn like the martyr that marries a slob,
wait, there’s more:
             not only can’t you stop at will, you can’t get started,
             the juice is dead
             some slackness in belt or disc
            something not flowing
            the black box caked with inertia.
Listen,
            you cried at the Royal Wedding and swallowed the cream,
meanwhile the tube lost its sight: snow, garbled snow in its face
            and a twisting of speech unknown in Babel, O
things have been going to pot,
            the paint peeling off your house,
            leprous, obscene, what about that?
The food has vanished under the weed,
the path has forgotten where in the world it was headed,
the mower that might begin to set things aright
is all smoke and flame and missing parts,
shorn of its function.
            Maybe you thought as you turned away toward exotic joys
            the objects you’d secretly started to hate
            would await your return unchanged
            loyal and fixed in their whatness?
You forgot the revenge of decay, you forgot
how even immobile things, unloved, blindly careen and plummet,
how care is a constant curing,
our bulletin first last and always: Aid.

Okay
            you’re back: the fat and languor are through.
The wind has shifted to pelt what’s left of the garden.
Strange birds are swarming the shorter days.
            You dreamed and the world dissolved
            but already the perfumes of distant sugars
            begin to escape from your larder,
            and you open your eyes to the list of your derelictions,
            whelmed with the staggering costs of restitution.
It is time you accept your share in the damage
and spend what needs to be spent.
Repair.

Read More

Borges’s Farewell to Meadville, Pennsylvania

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Myers

Featured Art: brown leather arm chair by Markus Spiske

By then, old age had laid siege to Borges
for many years. That evening, two handlers
one at each elbow, guided him, bent
like a question mark, up a short staircase
to his seat before the assemblage.
His voice, at first, was an ancient raven’s.
But finally, out of the brain’s dark nest,
he brought forth two lines from Virgil’s Georgics.
They glittered before him. His tongue loosened.
The night heat pressed in. A fragment of
Sappho. Erato beat the blackness back.
His listeners perceived her as wanderers
hear wings among pyrocanthus branches
under a thin moon. A couplet from Dryden,
a silver chain. “Ulalume” a small chalice.
He shifted more easily. One of his men
stepped forward with a glass of water.
Outside, sudden thunder, intermittent
flashes. After he’d spoken, they brought on
the musicians. He sat tapping his cane
to “St. James Infirmary,” smiling,
leaning forward toward the low-lit stage
as if in submission, he who had loved
the Goddess, and she him, letting himself
be lifted and carried off on the shoulders
of Milt Hinton’s gold-greaved bass.

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It Depends

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Rhoades 

Featured Art: Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread, and Wine by Claude Monet

We are all sick. We are all dying.
This is more or less
the truth, depending on the day.
Depending on the location,
some more than others
are headed home with hospice, toward
a tragic confrontation, a chicken bone, black ice.
Maybe it’s because of breakfast—
years of bitter coffee, the eggs
we were warned away from,
bracelets of sweet cereal O’s.
Perhaps it would help
if more of us knew CPR,
unless it all depends
on the weather of our hearts.
Don’t be fooled
by how quickly flesh folds
back into itself to heal,
or by the ones who are limping,
waxy-skinned and quiet. They will not carry
your part of this forever.
Maybe you should cover your cough,
not be so careless with knives.

Read More

Florida Man Throws Alligator into Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Alligators by John Singer Sargent

The attendant hands him a soda and turns her back, thinking
of straws—how she’s running low, and their candy-red stripes,
and the way everything here comes wrapped up in paper, and

then a 3½-foot alligator is clawing the air.
                                                                          As if she pressed
the wrong button on the register. Or maybe, during lunch rush,
she’d ignored an oncoming hurricane tossing them about.

In any case, she shrieks, finding for this alligator non sequitur
no earthly explanation. Back when the heavens functioned
with less subtlety, she might have turned to the logic of myth.

The god of rapacity took the shape of a lizard
to penetrate the food hall’s oil-glossed aperture.

Perhaps the oracle of Jupiter, FL on his faux-leather throne
delivers this cold-blooded message to confront corporate greed
teeth to teeth.
                        Not that the police have succeeded

in extracting a motive. The culprit’s Frosty-smeared lips are sealed.
His charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Yet it rings untrue.
For Florida Man, we need a more particular punishment:

accused of wielding a projectile reptile,
the defendant shall be flung naked
into the Loxahatchee Slough.

If indeed he is a criminal, there will be no proper dunking.
If he is a hero, he will don no duckweed laurel as he rises
from the mud. But the surveillance camera remembers:

it’s not so wide, the gap between the actual and the possible.
About the space from Nissan Frontier to take-out window
where an alligator, bewildered, sees the kitchen’s steam

like fog over a marsh in red bloom, smells the billows
of meaty fragrance, hears the gatekeeper’s yodel of welcome,
and for a moment
                                 flies.

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The Reflex

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Boats and setting sun by Ohara Koson

The scent of shampoo reminds me of carrots.
There’s an explanation, I swear, surfacing
from a developing-Polaroid brown. It’s April.
At recess an upside-down pizza slab is gooing
into the cracked blacktop, and a grainy beat
blasts from some girl’s hot-orange earbuds.
On the grass all the boys are playing wallball
with one of those rubber balls like a big pink eraser,
and when I’m up I don’t chuck it far enough
so Austin says, “Come on, Mitchell, you can’t
even throw like the girls,” which is heartbreaking
for a bunch of reasons. Back home, Duran Duran’s
“The Reflex” spins in the Discman on my bathtub rim.
You’ve gone too far this time, and I’m dancing
on the Valentine. My tunes are twenty years out of date
but I know them by heart. I’ve been lying there half an hour,
tub empty, stoking a burn in my gut. Next day in L.A.
(that’s Language Arts), it’s Fat Shawn’s turn at vocab charades
but he just stands there thinking until somebody shouts
“Rotund!” and that’s not his word but it is the end
of the game. That’s how cruelty works around here.
I’m no Shawn but I am Tree Kid and no one
tells me why. The reflex is a lonely child . . .
Jake calls me a poser for wearing skate shoes,
which is how I learn I wear skate shoes, and then
I chase him and kick him with those shoes. Mostly
I’m a head-down kind of kid. I don’t peek at the pull-down map
during the geography quiz. I don’t snicker when
the health teacher says gluteus maximus, but I am
the one who laughs when she can’t spell epididymis.
Another night and it’s the tub again, lights off, interpreting
the song with nonsense lyrics I’m sure have something
to do with all this clench and spasm. The reflex is a door
to finding treasure in the dark. I un-twist-tie
the plastic produce bag and glob out more Pantene, hating
the boys who run around cocksure with their narrow
calves and their throwing arms with actual
visible muscles and those stupid impossible taut butts
and I’ll show them with this soaped-up carrot
what I can take, how it stings, how I tighten my fist
as I hear them spit out my name.

Read More

Love’s Been Good to Me

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Andrew Robinson

Featured Art: Zurich by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The girl from Zurich is deathly quiet. But even in a king-sized bed her presence prickles me awake. Her fetal body rises, falls, a pillow wedged between us. A natural end approaches now; I’m sure she knows it too. We met six months ago, flotsamed onto the misfit table at a Chinese wedding. There was nothing to do but drink, and seven wines into the night we decided to go slumming at Orchard Towers—Singapore’s neon throwback of tacky sleaze. Sailors go there for the prostitutes, and bankers for the irony, but for her it was the Filipino bands. I love to dance to them, she said, they always try so hard. But she wouldn’t go there without a man, and so, still in my suit at 4 a.m., I held her as she cried on the sticky dancefloor. Cried with drunken empathy for the Indonesian whores she was dancing with. At their age I was still in school, she said, And they have to sell themselves to these fucking men. She feinted at the sweaty marines, bewildered with Burmese whisky and shore leave, and she had me at that. I’ve always been a sucker for compassion—it doesn’t always serve me well.

Then as she sniffed into the smoky bathroom I texted her something about goodness—I don’t remember what—which showed up as her Facebook status the next day. But like the young marines, she was shipping out in the morning, her company posting her to Paris. And it wasn’t until her stint was up—four months later—that we got to meet again. And all that texting and mailing and chatting online, it didn’t serve to warn us that after just a few weeks it wouldn’t be working the way we’d hoped. And now it’s coming to an end—no relish of redemption here—my thoughts rise on a sleepy surge of affection. The girl from Zurich: I’ll remember her—I will.

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Seafaring

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Featured Art: Eddystone Lighthouse by Mary Altha Nims 

As if love were a lighthouse and I
the creaking rain-lashed vessel

heaving through the waves.
In the wheelhouse, a heart

that refuses to give up, despite
sharp coral under surface churn

waiting to turn the boat
into a rusted hull the sun vermillions

each morning for photographers
who revel in the sea’s dominion.

I’m tired of chop but don’t remember
calm, the hatches battened down

so long they’re salted shut.
No, that’s not true. That’s someone

else’s story, not mine. I say,
for every hungry ghost in the hold,

ten thousand iron-spined sailors
with rope-calloused hands navigate

around the coral minefields, eyes
on the lighthouse, its revolving beam.

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I Never Met a Flower That Yelled At Me

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Moore 

Featured Art: Flowers by L. Prang and Co

her neighbor always says, explaining why,
every year, he plants & hangs
geraniums, begonias, impatiens, petunias,
even blue lobelia, amid his blooming bulbs.

She wants that sentiment to infect her, too,
the summer her husband leaves.
So on the hottest day Ohio can muster, she faces
the roses her husband sank in soil ten years before.

On the side of the house, they grow weed-loud—
even cantankerous saplings push through
the bushes, silencing all the kind words in their red mouths.
Everything has to go.

As she digs, thorns & muscular weeds
thick with prickles recite
her husband’s remarks on her skin,
scratching, clawing, tearing:

I can’t commit to you 100%, only 75%.
Shovel meets hard earth again & again.
Gasping for air, feeling her back spasm in protest,
she clings to the wood handle. You’re too hardline.

You want too much. She lets the sun scold her,
lets the heavy air weigh on her shoulders,
lets all of it, the whole fucking force
of his question—What do you mean I ‘disregard’ you?—

fuel her resistance, her freedom to say,
No, you & your furious mess
will not stand, not here, not any longer.
In their place, she leaves behind

what perennial peace she can—
pink Asiatic lilies, purple coneflowers,
& threadleaf coreopsis shining
their favor without ridicule or question.

Read More

Here Below

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Carleton

Featured Art: The quadrille at the Moulin-Rouge by Louis Abel-Truchet

Before a careless bulldozer buried him under a ton of dirt
he played with impeccable pulse.
He anchored tunes with a standup bass,

left fingers spidering, right hand patting pauses,
a running commentary that thumped below the chitchat,
bristling with off-color intent.

Just as hothouse plants rooted and swelled
to his sweet, muttered, nasty guy’s-guy nothings,
we set our feet in the soil of his crude jokes and thrived.

His wife didn’t pay much mind to the dirty stories
and sly non-secrets. When he laid their deck,
he penciled women’s names on the underside of the planking,

like an ode to abundance, and she just laughed, shrugging.
We take our cue from her and refuse to fret,
but celebrate him in smut and subtext.

Without crawling among the snakes to check, we hope
we made the list––divas of warm skin and rayon dresses
immortalized on a two-by-ten––

and we also aspire to be like his wife,
who stands aboveboard, rolling her eyes, knowing
her name has been etched more than once in that slatted dark.

Read More

Giverny

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies by Claude Monet

I try not to think about falling in love
too much, although sometimes I look
at pictures of Giverny.

You can visit you know.
See Claude Monet’s lily pad garden,
that famous footbridge.

I enjoy a good trip with my girlfriends.
A walk with my sweet mother.
But I want to see Giverny

with my partner. Whom I haven’t met.
Who might not want to fly 3,585 miles
to see a lily pad garden in France,

all of those pastels up close and floating.
Sometimes I check the website
confirming it’s open. That anyone can go.

Read More

Writing What You Know and Whom You’ve Known

.Reading time 18 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Joey Franklin

When I teach the essay to new college students, I usually put the kibosh on three subjects right away—the Big Disease, the Big Game, and the Big Break-Up. One reason for this blanket prohibition is as simple as it is selfish: I don’t want to read bad writing about tired subjects; and there are few subjects more exercised in the essays of new college students than dying family members, fleeting athletic glory, and the pains of first love.

I do have a more legitimate reason for this prohibition than my own desire to never read another internal monologue about teenage unrequited love. You see, I steer my students away from these subjects because, while the loss they represent is certainly real, it is a loss so common as to tax the ability of any writer—let alone a young writer—to say something worthwhile.

Perhaps, then, it is unfair that I follow up this prohibition by challenging my students to write according to Phillip Lopate’s dictum: “The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.”

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What Binds Them Together

.Reading time 19 minutes.

Features: Of Essays and Exes

By Rachael Peckham

When a MacArthur grant-winning poet and classicist writes about her ex-lover, she doesn’t commit a “thick stacked act of revenge” against him, a tempting “vocation of anger” enacted on the page. Yet Anne Carson, author of “The Glass Essay” (from the collection Glass, Irony, and God), knows it’s “easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.” It makes sense. Where there’s an ex, there’s the story of a relationship—a clear beginning, middle, and the dreaded end, with a natural protagonist in us versus them, the Exes.

That said, Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” which begins with the speaker’s losing sleep over an ex named Law, can hardly be called a clear or easy break-up story. In fact, it’s not a story at all but an essay in verse—one that doesn’t mention him much. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s not about him (is it ever, with the essay?) but about her. About several hers, actually; Carson oscillates between “three silent women” each struggling, each alone or left behind in love. It’s loss that binds them together.

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Breakup, Break Down, Break Open: Intimate Partner Violence and Life Inside a Daily Ending

.Reading time 14 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Sonya Huber

Some relationships fall apart in a gradual and mutual cooling, and others rise toward a crescendo of irreconcilable differences. Still others are threaded with periodic or daily heartbreak and even violence. Imagine living a love in which every moment was a breakup, and every next moment was a reunion, over and over and over. The essay of domestic violence is the essay of a living bonfire of a breakup, an extreme breakup in slow motion, and in this writing we can see essayists shining a light on heartbreak, but also on thornier issues of identity and personal safety.

Many of the best essays in this genre have to deal with misconceptions about domestic violence first, since the query applied to an abused person in a relationship is often: “Why didn’t she leave?,” why wasn’t a simple breakup the solution, as if the abused had a decision to make and then failed to make it correctly. For some people affected by domestic violence, though, the breakup hovers as a longed-for destination, an impossible shore to reach. Others fear the breakup due to real hazards and the effects of trauma. And so the question reveals the asker’s naiveté. The nature of violence is that it won’t simply be left. Violence pursues, damages, threatens, and changes the reality that contains it. Several notable essays have dealt with this painful truth.

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More than a Vanished Husband: Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”

.Reading time 17 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Holly Baker

“My vanished husband is neither here nor there,” Jo Ann Beard writes in her 1996 New Yorker essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” She’s describing a relationship caught in the freeze-frame of a collapse. The rafters have buckled   and the walls are caving in, but the marriage structure is falling, not yet fallen. Beard, though, is not centrally concerned with the catalyst of this disaster, nor  its aftermath. She does not reflect on settling dust or salvage work. Instead, with a sense of foreboding, her essay captures the days and hours preceding a series of inevitable tragedies: divorce, the death of her dog, and a horrific campus shooting that leaves seven people dead and a survivor seeking new self- definition.

Beard’s lack of control over these horrible intertwining events permeates the writing, and her failing marriage hovers continuously and gloomily in the background as she thinks about her “vanished” husband. But why vanished? Why does Beard paint him this way, not as estranged or simply gone, but vanished?

In this word, she seems to want to elicit a magic trick, and readers may just as well finish the phrase in their minds: vanished without a trace. Unexamined and unexplained—this is exactly the approach Beard uses to distance herself from the heartbreak of impending divorce, from allowing herself to mourn a relationship that has died. To spare herself and the relationship from bare examination, she instead creates buffers and barriers as tools to cope with and contextualize these losses.

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On Breaking Up with the Dream of Your Former Self: Megan Daum’s “My Misspent Youth”

.Reading time 10 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

We all know “you can’t go home again,” but what does it mean to long for a place we’ve never inhabited, to love that idea so much that it feels like the beginning of a relationship? And what does it mean to finally admit defeat and break up with that ideal?

Megan Daum, in “My Misspent Youth,” writes of her infatuation with—and split from—New York City, and her long-cherished imagination of the life she would lead there. Daum begins by recounting a time in high school when she first saw a couple’s artsy, romantic Upper West Side apartment. From that moment she was driven by an “unwavering determination to live in a pre-war, oak-floored apartment on or at least in the immediate vicinity of 104th Street and West End Avenue.” Daum goes on to detail how this obsession influenced every major decision of her late teens and twenties, until she discovers—as in most relationships—there’s no escaping money trouble.

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On Natalia Ginzburg’s “Human Relations”

.Reading time 21 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Dinah Lenney

“ . . . the friend we’ve dropped is hurt on our account . . . We know this but we have no regrets, indeed we feel a kind of covert pleasure, for if someone suffers on our account, it shows we have the power to cause pain, we who for so long felt utterly weak and insignificant.”

So writes Natalia Ginzburg in “Human Relations” in which she considers the way people come together and grow apart; and come together and grow apart; not a breakup essay exactly, and yet it will serve, I think, I hope, since Ginzburg breaks (or anticipates breaking) with parents and friends and relations from beginning to end. She hangs her reflection-on-the-human-condition (that’s what this is)—in which we humans are eventually forced to come to terms with how human we are (as in helpless in the face of the universe, as in doomed from the start)—on a story of coming of age, beginning in childhood when we are understandably baffled by adults and their “dark and mysterious” ways. Next, sparked by adolescence, comes the long middle of the piece: Enamored of our peers, Ginzburg admits “we punish the adults . . . by our profound contempt”; by the end of the essay, she herself has grown up, of course. “We are so adult now,” she tells us, “that our adolescent children are already starting to look at us with eyes of stone.” In other words, what goes around comes around, right? As for what happens in between: Relationships—hers (ours?)—keep ending and ending and ending of natural causes, which (if we don’t count death) only means we eponymous humans—naturally (hopelessly) fickle and self-serving—are to be held responsible more often than not.

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New Ohio Review Issue 21 (Originally Published Spring 2017)

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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 21 compiled by Averie Hicks

Push

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: by Clay Banks

I’m trying to look as if I’m suffering.
I have this anguished expression on my face
but it’s wasted since I’m wearing a surgical mask
and anyway the focus here is really on my wife
and the doctor is right there between her legs
and he’s shouting Push, and my wife
is doing this astounding thing, she’s pushing
yet another human being into the world, a world
that so far seems to be pushing back,

and the baby’s heartbeat is down to 90
so the doc says, I think maybe one more try,
then we do the Caesarean, so things in the room
really are a bit tense, it’s definitely a moment
that demands a lot of attention, and my wife
is gathering whatever shreds of strength
remain in the shaking exhausted sleeve of flesh
her body has become, the blood and sweat and fluids
everywhere, and this is It!—when I hear
the attending nurse standing just behind me
saying to this guy in scrubs standing next to her,
I think he’s the anesthesiologist’s assistant,

Well, just because Karen says she has a boyfriend
doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t go out with you,
and the guy says, his voice rising because my wife
really is screaming quite loudly at this point,
Yeah, OK, I guess I should give it a try, I mean
what’s the worst that can happen, other than
getting shot down and looking like a total fool,

and the nurse says, as the doctor is shouting PUSH, 
Yeah, but hasn’t it been like a long dry spell for you?
Aren’t you getting a little desperate here? And the guy
laughs and my wife screams again and the doctor
says Yes and into the world comes the bloody head
followed by the naked lovely bloody little boy
insanely ill-prepared for any of this, and I guess
the guy actually is going to ask Karen out
and I say go for it.

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Void Unfilled

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: Long Exposure Couple by Jr Korpa

I walk past Erin’s house at dusk
and there she is at her kitchen table,
working on her book about the Reformation.

She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure,
but it’s slow going because being a single mom
is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner
and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation,
which I can see her writing about right now,
her face attractive yet harried in the glow
of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.

Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son,
shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway
under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage
by the father now remarried and living in Dayton,
as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble,
against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did
when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead,
my mother inside looking harried and scared,
studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.

And although I hardly know Erin,
I feel I should walk up, knock on her door,
and when she opens it (looking harried,
apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me.
And she will smile with relief and say
yes, of course, what took you so long,
and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation
and start frying up some pork chops for us

as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise
the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot,
and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe
build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering
on the basement workbench where the ghost
father left them on his way to Dayton.

I will fill the void, having left voids of my own,
except that my own wife and son are waiting
down the street for me to come home for dinner,
and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled,
as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out
a further contribution to the body of scholarship
concerning the Reformation, and Andrew
sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.

Read More

Horseplay

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

Featured Art: Abstraction, 1906 by Abraham Walkowitz

I am floating in the public pool, an older guy
who has achieved much, including a mortgage,
a child, and health insurance including dental.

I have a Premier Rewards Gold Card
from American Express, and my car
is quite large. I have traveled to Finland.
In addition, I once met Toni Morrison
at an awards banquet and made some remarks
she found “extremely interesting.” And last month
I was the subject of a local news story
called “Recyclers: Neighbors Who Care.” In short,
I am not someone you would take lightly.

But when I begin to playfully splash my wife,
the teenaged lifeguard raises her megaphone
and calls down from her throne, “No horseplay in the pool,”
and suddenly I am twelve again, a pale worm
at the feet of a blonde and suntanned goddess,
and I just wish my mom would come pick me up.

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I Tie My Shoes

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere

Featured art: ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh

I’m walking home late after work
along Meadowbrook Road when I realize
the guy half a block ahead of me
is Bill, from Religious Studies.
I recognize his bald spot, like a pale moon
in the dusk, and his kind of shuffling,
inward-gazing gait. Bill walks
like a pilgrim, measuring his stride
for the long journey, for the next step
in the hard progression of steps.

And while I like Bill, and in some ways
even admire him (he wrote something important
maybe a decade ago on Vatican II),
I slow down a little bit. I even stop
and pretend to tie my shoes, not wanting
to overtake him, because I’m afraid
of the thing he’s carrying, which is big
and invisible and grotesque, a burden
he’s lugging through the twilight, its weight
and unwieldiness slowing him down,
as it has for five years, since a drunk
killed his teenaged son, and Bill’s bald spot
dawned like a tonsure and his gait
grew tentative and unsure, and his gaze
turned inward as his body curled itself
around the enormous, boy-shaped
emptiness, and the question
he spends his days asking God.

And if I caught up with him
and we walked together through the dusk
he would ask me about my own son,
who is three, and the vast prospect of the future
onto which that number opens, involving
Little League and camp-outs and touch
football in the backyard would hang there,
terrible and ablaze in the autumn twilight,
and the two of us would have to slog
down Meadowbrook Road like penitents,
adding its awful weight to the weight of his son
on our backs, our shoulders, and so I fail
Bill, and stop and pretend to tie my shoes.

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Facebook Sonnet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tanya Grae

Featured Art: by Prateek Katyal

Someone thinks I’m beautiful again
                & likes posts of my day, comments.
I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable—
                bungeed off ether & the interplay.
Punch-drunk in this blue-sky space,
                a rush of the past, the in-between,
whole chapters, I open annuals
                & albums from storage. His change
in status: single. Papers in hand,
                this backlit man heaves toward
the kite’s trailing end: What if?—
                that butterfly. My youngest lights
onto my lap. Who’s that?—
                as a key turns the lock, I log off.

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Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Krystal Sanders

Of the way you spend Saturday morning in your room, instead of helping Papaw with the lawn work. You watch him on the riding mower, in customary slacks and suspenders, coasting back and forth beneath your window as if the ragged scream of the machine will summon you like a siren to your manly duty. You raise the binoculars Papaw used when he was stationed in West Africa during WWII, long before his shoulders bowed and his skin darkened with liver spots. They are clunky, large in your hands even though you’ve had a growth spurt and you’re well on your way to catching up to Peter, who’s a whole six feet and had college basketball scouts watching him at every game last season. It was Peter’s senior year of high school, your freshman year. The fall had been glorious, riding the cloud of popularity as Peter Thompson’s younger brother. The other kids, the teachers and coaches, cafeteria ladies, librarians, all looking at you with an expectation that was not yet a burden. You joined the Fellowship of Christian Students, which Peter was president of, and took the Advanced Placement classes he’d taken. You had more friends than you’d ever had before. Through the lens, Papaw’s face jumps up at you. You’re intimately aware of every wrinkle, every nose hair. He guides the mower in long, straight lines, first in front of your window at the corner of the house, on the second floor, and then away toward the county road. The motor’s howl falls to a low growl, builds back up as he returns exactly two feet to the left, is eventually reduced to a low grumble at the back of the house.

Your mother wouldn’t approve of the way you watch the world, binoculars pressed to your face, aimed into the neighborhood across the county road. The man who owns the nearest corner lot, 5371, has some kind of shepherd. The dog roams along its chainlink fence, pants in the heat, takes a shit. You catch a glimpse of motion deeper in the neighborhood and sit up straight. You focus on the door that caught your eye, at 5377 striding out of the back of her house in shorts and a man’s plaid shirt. She is headed to the metal trash barrel at the back of the lot. You know she will stand there for a long time, and then go back inside. You imagine burying your fingers in the tangle of her long hair. She is barefoot, and the thought of the stiff crunchiness of the yellow grass against the tender arches of her feet almost makes you moan.

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The Worn-Out West

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Pamela Davis

Featured Art: by Jannes Glas

I drive past motel signs advertising
free cable for bikers, truckers numbed
by cracked asphalt. A looseness,
as if everything is slipping
away, and the sky shaved thin as mica.

Stretch of dusty storefronts hung
with local art—warriors astride
painted horses, mesas. The Rio Grande
cuts in and out, shape-shifting
between cottonwoods. In the café,
regulars remove their hats, sit alone.

One gathers himself judge-straight
as the waitress refills his mug,
her bar rag slung over a bare shoulder.
She gifts him a sudden, chipped-tooth
grin. Yesterday she banned
a drifter for fouling the toilet she lets
everyone use. Today she walks a cup
of coffee across the street for
a homeless guy wrapped in his own arms.

On her own this young, every new boss—
town, lover—will treat her like a stolen car.

Smooth, how she glides
from radio to grill. Easy, her talk,
comebacks quick. And outside, a mountain
looms, split long ago by a blast. Wire mesh hugs
some of it back. I want to tell her temporary
lasts a long time. The air is thin
up here. It’s nobody’s idea of home.

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What My Massage Therapist Girlfriend Discovers When I’m On Her Table For the First Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wilder

Featured Art: ‘Avocado’ (1916) by Amada Almira Newton

Your right leg is shorter than your left.
There’s something funny happening in your left shoulder.
You should change your detergent and go fragrance-free.
Is this too much pressure?

You once had a girlfriend who threw bottles at your head.
You haven’t slept well in decades.
You store all the grief for your dead mother in your solar plexus.
Breathe.

You grind your teeth.
You have the musical tastes of a seventeen-year-old girl.
There’s tension in your neck which runs down your left side.
No one believes that you are not attracted to Rebecca.

Does this hurt?
Let me stretch you out a bit more.

For someone with such little flexibility, you have a surprisingly good vertical.
You’ve wounded more people than you’re willing to admit.
Your father will die soon and you’ll have no clue where to turn.
You and your brothers will drift apart.
Sorry about that. Just trying to break it up.

Nothing will get easier for a long time.
You loved the bottle thrower something fierce.
You can’t hear your mother’s voice anymore.
Turn on your side, please.

You still love the sun sneaking through cracked windows.
You have a closet full of clothes that no longer fit.
Holding your breath won’t help either of us.
There you are.

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Stuff

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claudia Monpere

Featured Art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920 by Eugène Atget

I saw you, daughter, sneaking
a garbage bag of my treasures
into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.

Never mind the cracked lenses
and broken hinges, the bent frames.
Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp.
I’ll make a mobile.

The broken picture frames and dried-out
pens. Even the bottle caps beg
to be known. And how patient
those stacks of hotel soap.
Waiting. Just in case.

Yes newspapers haystack the walls.
But it’s all there: knowledge at my
fingertips. The postman will bring more.

There is an ocean liner inside my heart
that waits to set sail. The crowds wave
at the dock. My shades are drawn.
Bring me, daughter.
Don’t take. Bring me a basket 
brimming with words.

Not fester, not filth—
fang words that surgeon my heart.
Bring me gossamer, lagoon, violet-crowned
hummingbird.
Bring me, daughter, elixir of cloud.

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A Race Car Made of Sand

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Margot Wizansky

Featured Art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Frank Knox Morton Rehn

Everything made my mother nervous:
the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies.
So we went out to the beach.
I took my bucket and shovel.
My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders
and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father,
who was too weak to carry anything.
He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees,
his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room.
He hadn’t shaved.
His face had been blue for weeks,
the circles under his eyes, dark as his beard.
Mother said I was too heavy to sit in his lap.
All afternoon I dug a string of frantic little ponds.
Nothing was right; my back was sunburnt;
my father hardly moved.
Uncle Robert came, like a bus from the city,
to build me a race car of sand, with jar lids
for hubcaps and for headlights, clamshells,
and he found a quoit on the beach for the steering wheel.
He dug me a driver’s seat that just fit,
and a rumble seat for my little brother.
My father peeled me an apple with his penknife,
in one long piece, that didn’t ever break.

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Some Things Rosa Can’t Tell Little Esmeralda

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Barbara de la Cuesta

Featured Art: by Farrukh Beg

A late afternoon after work, Rosa puts the flame down under the rice and beans and sits with her feet up in Laureano’s recliner. The knock on the front door Rosa thinks must be Mondo’s social worker, the only person she knows who doesn’t just walk in the back door. Mondo is in detention again for defacing a wall, or an overpass, something.

But it isn’t the social worker, it’s little Esmeralda, daughter of the Mexican grocer on Moody Street, who comes in politely, sits opposite her with a notebook, and asks Rosa can she ask her some questions. Hah, like the social worker, Rosa thinks, then corrects herself. This is a child she used to see sitting on the floor of her father’s abasto sorting red beans. The girl tells Rosa she needs to write a biography of an older person for her fifth grade class.

Ah, Rosa, with her aching feet, feels old.

Not old, old; just older than me, says the child. She used to be in Rosa’s catechism class at St. Justin’s and was notably better behaved and brighter than any of the others.

Hokay, says Rosa, not yet realizing what will happen to her.

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Miles

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Mike Lewinski

It was dark, sure, but the city’s halo
whitewashed the stars.
We drank good bourbon from Dixie cups
to mock our sophistication.
Two black men and a white one
who needed a brother.
We drank to Ghana advancing,
not so naïve to believe
they had a chance against England.
We toasted our wives of many colors
and our barefoot children chasing fireflies
like the first night in Eden.
But it was Oakland.
So when the boy climbed the porch steps
cupping a winged and glowing offering,
I called him by the wrong name, as if
I did not know him, as if his father
was not my friend.
The brothers exchanged their look,
too polite to call me out
on a summer night in paradise.
And we all pretended not to notice
the bats that let go their roosts
to flap old patterns in our chests.
Suddenly I felt like humming
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” professing my love
for Serena, telling them all about my black Scout leader
whom I hadn’t thought about in years,
assembling, in other words, my own minstrel show
to prove how down I am.
All the while, the party soundtrack plays on
through hidden speakers, Kind of Blue 
from the end of that gorgeous terrible horn:
Live, no net, each note feeling its way
into the dark as if we can still improvise,
as if there is always another chance
to get it right before the night ends.
The boy, who isn’t Miles after all,
keeps coming closer
to show me his gift, opening the dark
hemispheres of his hands so I can see
the pulsing fireflies lift off
to join the others in the city’s halo
far above our heads.

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Mitigation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Romina Farías

Somehow it’s good to know
the wildfires have not touched the face
of our local TV anchor
delivering her lines
with a touch of sadness that never approaches
despair, even as her bangs cascade
onto her forehead like evening clouds
descending the Coast Range.
I think of her in her dressing room
before she offers her face to us—
the one that will help us fall asleep—
while a line of flames somewhere far away
descends the ridge and licks into a kitchen,
melting the refrigerator magnets,
popping cans of spray oil, and setting
the dog out back to howling, jerking
against its chain.
I see her in front of the mirror,
surrendering to the ministrations of tiny brushes— 
a makeup artist leaning in like a lover.
Foundation first, an A-side attack
on brow furrows and laugh lines.
Then concealer to suppress the advance
of crow’s feet into the Botox buffer zone.
Within a half-hour, the spread of creases
and fissures 95% contained.
The brushes flit across her face
like prayer flags, and I can almost smell
the warm breath of the girl who sticks out
the tip of her tongue, leaning close
to line the boundary
where the fullness of a lower lip
begins its concave plunge
into smooth white chin.
Our TV anchor practicing her lines,
mastering her face.
We need to love her for this.
For the way she shows us how to keep
a chin from trembling, an eye from twitching
even while the chained dog
curls in on itself in the burning.

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Parrots Over Suburbia

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by McGill Library

There are two,
as if some ark came to rest
on the high school football field
and Noah flung them through an open window
to test whether this cement-skinned town
can sustain life.
See them there, trimming
lava-dipped wings in the sky above Costco,
bills curved like question marks.
And what do they ask, out of earshot
of the man with sunflower seeds?
Do you know what it means
to circle, to draw and redraw the tightening
circumference of your life
above the grid of 50-year roofs,
in steak smoke risen from backyard barbecues?
The parrots’ owner is no prophet.
Summer evenings, he wrenches
on a ’67 Mustang that drips its innards
onto his Avenue L driveway.
And at dusk, he makes his arm a perch,
takes the two from their cage,
feeds them from his lips, knowing
if they love him he need not maim their wings.
So they fly in circles
and on every pass above the fenced playground,
swoop near to watch the girl in high-tops and earbuds
swinging, head thrown back to reveal
her pale and wild throat.

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Steno

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

“Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition
characterized by the intense desire to write . . . ”
“It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.”

It’s as if . . . , he says, It’s like . . . , or, It’s ABOUT
things being simply THERE, molecular,
blue, strewn, flattened, aflame.
He pulls up the shade and looks out.
There’s this kind of accounting he does:
sidewalk, hedgerow, phone pole.
He lists the round and the ready-made.
He notes the hand-carved and the curved.
He sorts by color and shape.
He lists by size and by brightness.
He notes the nautical, normal and nameless.
It’s Wednesday and he’s moved from columns
to rows: alphabetic, magnetic, majestic . . .

He lists the unowned and the changed,
the charged, unsuitable and smooth.
He leans forward turning the page.
It’s like . . . , It’s as if . . . , he says,
as if these THINGS, this STUFF:
hunk and clod, object and article, gizmo,
whatnot, doodad, exactingly placid, substantial
and actual, for knowing nothing,
know it all: guruish shoe-tree, savvy axle.
He opens the door and sits on the stoop.
It’s as if each thought over-laps the last.
A girl on a bike goes by.

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Fable

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: Formerly attributed to Zhao Boju (ca. 1120s-ca.1162)

People often spoke
about her mousy behavior,

her gray squeaky voice,
but no one made the connection

that the words they used,
which she devoured like giant crumbs,

commenced her change,
so that when she drew the curtains

to darken the air
it was not a sign of depression

as they had begun to suppose
but simply a trait as she became

more and more nocturnal,
scurrying about the rooms, the tail

of her housecoat trailing.

Read More

Safehouse

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti

Pull up any rug, there’s a hole.
An easy chair sits on a trap door, which leads to
a slide. I am still surprised, after all these years,
how many tunnels are in my house.

In the basement, which is under the place
you would consider the basement, is
what I call “the secret room.” But all my rooms
are really secret rooms. It has a large
colored map on the wall, a folding table under
a fluorescent light, a red couch.

I go down there to find
a way to slip something into my dreams or to
block my escape routes. I am a spy, don’t
you know? I don’t look like a spy, and I’m paid
nothing for my work, but I do it anyway.
I was called, as they say, to duty.

Under my clothes, I’m naked.
Within my ID card is another identity.
I can change at will. I have a machine
that scrambles my words into code,
a pill I can bite to shift my mood,
a certification to never sleep.

Now I must run.
Even though there is no such thing as a
hiding spot in this house. Even if I put on
my invisible suit. Even if I cover my face
so I can’t see myself.
In the bathroom cupboard is a shelf that lifts
to reveal a chute which looks like it’s for laundry,
but it isn’t. I can’t hear when I hit bottom.

Read More

Other People’s Ranch Dressing

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kate Maclam

Featured Art: by Au Lido Plate no.14 (1920)

I wanted to smell less like
a restaurant and more like
a woman.
I tried my best.
All the women I know could
have sex with famous men
like J Hamm or Leo D or BJ.
All the women I know smell like
French Vanilla perfume
and fresh cigarettes.
They smell like thin people.
When I describe them I say,
she is thin like a rich person.
I say, she eats paper
and melts diamonds,
to stay thin—
she huffs paint thinner.
I say, she has never touched
another person’s ranch dressing
or brushed it onto her thigh
where it looked like
the seed of a famous man
or anyone really.

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Nightmare on Elm Street

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By T. J. Sandella

Featured art by Vrouw aan kaptafel

Though they’re meant to be our protagonists,
we detest these teenagers
who fall for the same tricks and traps
in every film
and because they keep coming back
dumber and hotter
decade after decade
with their perky breasts and discernible abs
and the way they throw themselves mercilessly
against one another
in backseats and on twin beds
and because they smoke cigarettes
and slug soda and beer
and because dialysis and diabetes
will never creep like Freddy
into their dreams.
Because they’re always in love
and loneliness is as unimaginable
as feigning sleep
so the person next to you
will stop kissing your neck
though you still care for her
and he’s still beautiful
or maybe you don’t
and maybe he’s not
or maybe the workday has emptied you
of desire for anything
but seven hours of silence
and maybe these are the words you say
that can’t be forgiven. Curse the children
for not knowing
that if you live long enough
life is mostly washing dishes
and may they suffer
for not believing
that young love dies
when the first person
goes to college
and meets a sorority girl
who can put her legs behind her head
or the backup point guard with the bulging
biceps. Twelve bucks is a bargain
to see these brainless babes
pierced by pitchforks, their chiseled flanks flayed
and hung from hooks. It’s because
their failures will never grind them
into something so small
that they’ll go to a theater alone,
buy some popcorn, and sit in the glow
of another slasher reboot, trying to distract themselves
from their disappointing lives.

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Loving by Numbers

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Frances Orrok

Featured Art: by Nick Fewings

10
my dog, climbing trees, apples, my sister
On two separate car journeys, one with my mother, one with my father, I ask each of them to choose the last thing they’d give up. At ten, my questions take this form with some regularity: exaggerated parameters, carefully explained rules. “It can be food or water or something solid, but it doesn’t have to be. You only have twenty-four hours to live.” Both ask if they can think about it. Both remember to answer by the end of the journey (a hastily added rule).

My father: “the capacity to love.”
My mother: “to know I am loved.”

11
anywhere outside the classroom; mud, cold, leaves, not sports, lists
I start smoking in ditches. I ask my father if he’d still love me if I went to prison. “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate or ask what crime I will have committed. I think about this and watch the back of him digging. I don’t doubt his words but I am curious. “What if I joined the IRA?” There is a long pause and he straightens out for it. The Irish Republican Army is in the news a lot. They drive fear into every school child, make public transport and Saturdays anxious. There are no longer bins on the streets, litter blows frightened of b-o-m-b-s. “There will always be things you could do to make loving you harder. That’s not the same as not loving you. Difficult doesn’t mean no.”

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Advice

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: by Fran Hogan

Don’t ever make him a take-me-back
mix CD. But if you do, open with Sam Cooke’s
“Bring It On Home To Me.”
If Kim from high school wants to wait
in the really long line for the panda
at the zoo, don’t complain.
That panda is going to be so cuddly cupping
its paw around the bamboo, your heart
will do a somersault. Besides,
you’ll miss Kim when you’re away
trying to tell her updates
before the metro goes underground.
“I’m going on a date and wearing eyeliner.”
“You’re going on a date with a minor?”
Distance can be so hard. If you take
a dance class at the gym don’t stand
in the very back. Halfway through they turn
around and that side becomes the leaders
of the choreographed dance
everyone knows but you. You want
a middle-back spot for minimal shame.
One more thing about boys—
sometimes they’re sending a message
by not sending a message. There are many
films and books about this. If you need
an easy Halloween costume
go with Clark Kent. You just wear
glasses, a button-up shirt, a loose tie,
and show a Superman logo
underneath. You can even make
a Daily Planet badge if there’s time.
That noise you hear in the morning
opening the coffee shop isn’t
the other barista sneezing.
It’s the espresso machine warming up—
you don’t need to say bless you.
Ask your mom how she’s doing. Early
in each phone call ask her and really listen.
If you don’t, she’ll let you talk and talk
and what kind of person
do you want to be? You should
probably read Dante, that gets referenced
a lot. Anyone who hates Bob Dylan,
especially the Blood On The Tracks album,
is wrong. He’s given us a road map
to life, they should be grateful.
One last thing—don’t be scared
when the Georgetown cross-country team
is running toward you full speed
on the bridge. I know
it’s the bridge with the narrow walkway
close to traffic, where there’s nowhere
for you to step to the side.
Just raise up both of your hands.
Sixty people will give you high-fives
and keep going.

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Mawwage

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Rising Dove, 1934 by Harold Edgerton

Mawwage is what bwings us together.
—The Princess Bride

At five, a clamorous bird
proposed outside our window: 
Will-ya will-ya will-ya, then? 
when a high-pitched vireo
like a shotgun bride
interposed fuck-you fuck-you 
before his liquid goddess
could reply, with a flirty little 
who-me who-me? followed by
something like my mother’s 
tch-tch-tch-ing at my father’s
stories she’d heard a million
times before, nattering
away as if strapped on
currents of confused desire,
but finally speeding up
to an ascendant trill—I do
I do, I do / aspire to—

broken off by our alarm clock’s
insistent beep. Aspire to . . . ?
Aspire to . . . ? Happiness?
Transcendence? Sleep?
I turned it off to hear
not the long-married coo
of doves I often do
upon waking, but the shameless
heart of a bird
quivering in song
that knows itself alone

except for you, afloat
among the highest shelves
of dark and light, singing
and singing the changes through.

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Marriage at 17 Years

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gary Dop

“Come here—quick!” You know it, her serious, nearly
               whispered call. She says, “I think it’s a squirrel.”
Brown bulb of fur, it’s tucked behind an old chair.
               The kids sleep upstairs; you have both abandoned
your evening’s screens. You are here,
               a step away from a baby flying squirrel. You grab
the wicker hamper. She says, “Don’t scare it.”
               Hamper in one hand, towel in the other, you wonder
how to catch it without scaring it. The big-eyed squirrel
               knows you’re there. “Be careful,” you hear as you swipe
at the squirrel who scampers, fast as life,
               into the wicker trap you lift and close.
Then she says, “It’s in there,” a statement of fact
               that feels like a question. You say, “It’s in there,”
your voice an octave too high. She peeks through
               the wicker gaps to snap a picture. You relax
your grip on the lid, and the wild thing wriggles free.
                You scream. She smacks you
upside the head, a gentle reminder of the hibernating children.
               You both scurry after the squirrel
which seems so scared until it’s near the stairs—
               then it’s a feral beast between you and your offspring.
With animalistic ease—her leap and block, your swipe
               and scoop—the rodent’s back in its cage,
and you’re out on the sidewalk, clutching the hamper,
               waiting for your neighbors—just pulling away—
to be far enough not to see your business. You both smile
               and wave too easily, like stoned teenagers startled by cops.
A moment later, the flying squirrel is off:
               The thing that just happened is over.
And you are outside, suddenly together.

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The Double

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gary Dop

Featured Art: by Tim Mossholder

When I order fast food, I feel superior
to the place I am in, the people
who serve me, and the grease
about to grip my gut, but
the cashier asks “Is that poetry?”
pointing at the distressed volume I hold.
I say, “Yes,” and she says, “Yes,
I thought so,” her eyes bloom,
no longer machines. Her hand rests
on the input screen as she quotes Frost
or Dickinson: something about “long sleep,
a famous sleep,” and she adds, “Was ever idleness
like this?” Flustered, I reply: “I’ll take
the double with mustard and pickles.” She sees
into me, a mass-produced poetry patty
stamped for the look of flavor. She sees
my surprise and knows that beneath our exchange,
burger for cash, is deeper change:
The life I’ve slept inside, she takes, discards,
and watches me wake.

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Red Beans and Rice

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Sprouse

Featured Art: ‘Modes et Manières de Torquat‘

The medium said you were not coming back.
So I ate my red beans and rice
same as on our wedding day
down in Algiers, Louisiana.

The next day you rode
off with the Russian, Porshenokov,
in a little MG, your long straw hair
whipping in the streets

in the wind of the French Quarter
and down on the bayous, where it’s
too hot to sleep. The cemetery on Ramparts
was a forest of stone, the dead

above ground. On account of
the hurricanes, they said, and high water
on the Mississippi that stirs underneath
and raises them up.

That time you came back,
in heat, in sweat, with cotton-mouth
and juju. The South was our
time to be hot.

Next day you shipped out
lithe as a dolphin
rolling and tumbling down to the delta
on whiskey and water we called our lives.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me . . .
on Lake Pontchartrain, in the boat
of our nights, your prodigal smile
alive with fabulous poison.

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Year of the Rat

.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Lucas Church

Featured Art: Chinese Zodiac Animals in Harmony by Kerima Swain

On my birthday, the twenty-fifth anniversary of a space shuttle disaster, I move in with Uncle, who lives next to a trash heap. The heap is privately owned, not the county dump, not open to just anybody, and it’s haloed with crows. I squirrel myself upstairs while Uncle watches the video of the spaceship disintegrating into smoke, repeating. I mention in passing an ex-boyfriend with fists like cans of beans, that he’s looking for me, probably. Outside the crows bicker while I hide under the covers, the house full of Uncle’s sobs back to the television.

The shuttle exploded hours before I was born. A question of timing, my mother said.

Fast forward to our routine each morning: Uncle sloughs to the door and asks if I am okay, if I need anything. I always say no, but offer to clean his pool, where trash from the heap sometimes catches. Uncle doesn’t ask about Ex, though he’s gleaned I’m running from Ex’s jealousies and agendas, but rattles out something about decisions, good and bad, where they end us all up.

After weeks of this dance, he finally needs something: We lack pudding. Uncle has a sweet tooth. Or maybe we could go for dinner, he says, talk about things, hit some of the friendly bars, etc. Two guys on the prowl then silence and we all feel embarrassed for him together.

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My Mother’s Dogs

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Three Dogs Fighting by Antonio Tempesta

They are big and smelly and mean,
and they’re living in her basement.
I think they are dogs, but they might be wolves.
Eight or eighteen of them, something like that.
They all would bite me if I gave them
the chance, so I’m really careful
when I herd them out into the yard.
What is it with my mother?
Most families just have pets—usually one dog
and a cat, nothing like this. How
did she let this happen to her?

She’s living in some decrepit house now on Rt. 9
in the next town over and she’s evidently lost
her taste in furniture. Everything is gold
with rickety legs. She and I watch
the dogs patrol around the yard
from behind a glass sliding door. My mother is angry
now that she’s old, and I think that maybe
she and the dogs deserve each other, but
I can tell that my mother is scared too,
and I want to help her out because
I’m the problem-solver in our family.

The dogs don’t play like normal dogs,
they just move around the yard
like big bullet-headed missiles. We have to get rid
of them somehow, I tell my mother who is
suddenly smaller than she was, and then I hold her
in my arms and she’s a little girl. Whatever you do,
don’t let them in, I whisper, but
she’s already dead of lung cancer.

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Serenity Room

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Hillringhouse

Featured Art: Buste van een oude vrouw by Anonymous

There are five recliners in a circle,
each with a spongy blanket.
The lights have been dimmed,
but an aide has left behind her walkie-talkie
and it sounds like it’s ready to lift off.
My mother is in one recliner, I’m in another,
an easy way to spend time now that she’s afraid
of the color red and distrusts windows
as if the glass weren’t there and the fingers
of the dwarf palmetto would reach in
and pull her down into its dark center
to cut out the last cluster of syllables
huddled beneath her tongue.

I look over to see if she’s sleeping
and her eyes are open as though
she’s forgotten to close them. Maybe
she’s on some dusky street where half-drawn
figures drift and sounds almost blossom
into meaning. Maybe she opens a door
and her aunts from Brooklyn are there
and clutch her to their mountainous breasts
where she could stay forever.

She tries to inch out of the recliner but an aide
intercedes with a cup of apple juice
which my mother examines closely
for poison and studies her hand as if it’s
screwed to her wrist. Then she brings the cup
to her lips as if it’s the last thing left
from the world when she was Shirley
and carried keys, lipstick, cash.

And I hope that the cold, sweet liquid
brings a moment’s pleasure, but how can it be
that it comes to this, that at the end you get
thrown in the ring for one more brutal round
without enough stamina to put on your shoes
or enough strength to say Thank you or Go to hell.

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Catpants

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Allen

Featured Art: The cat at play, c.1860-1878 by Henriëtte Ronner

dead cat on the shoulder
my heart aches for a moment
until I realize it is only
a balled-up pair of sweatpants

why would I feel compassion
were it a cat lying dead there
and not a balled-up
pair of sweatpants

I think it is because
cats are defenseless
and innocent then
I re-evaluate

they are neither
the average housecat
has injured several people
in its short life

just for laughs
the person who had to throw
his sweatpants out the window
a moment’s thought for him

for his sweatpants
and for the sad conflict
that must have unfolded
between them

Read More

The Meat of It

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

To make a good book you need what William
Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”
So before I started in I got some ground beef
and dropped it on the hardwood with a Spat! 
It felt wrong. Like dropping a baby. But I did it
for art. When my son came home from school
he said, Why is there meat on the floor? I said,
Art. He nodded like maybe that made sense
and said, It’s kind of freaking me out. I know,
I said, me too. We all have to make sacrifices.
Is that blood leaking out or juice? he asked.
I’m not sure I’m one to make that distinction,
I said, mostly to avoid answering the question.
I didn’t tell him how strange it was to unwrap
the meat so carefully, the plastic peeling away
like a onesie on a warm day, and then just sort
of hurl it down at the hardwood with a Spat! 
Are we still going to eat it? he asked after a bit.
I’m not sure, I said. I think it depends upon
a lot of different factors, a lot of ins and outs.
Is this a writing thing? he asked, because you
have that weird look in your eye. I’m your
father, I said. I held you as a baby. I’d never
use a moment like this just to make a poem.

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Dune Cat

.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Winnie Anderson

Featured Art: by Oliver Goldsmith

Eons ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, the jaguar left his home and traveled across the cold arid grassland: his resolve set. The floods were coming again. If he stayed, the land would either be covered with water or be broken into land pockets, from which there’d be no escape. The time was now. He had to go.

In him the jaguar carried echoes of history, tens of millions of years’ worth of heat spikes, ice ages, tectonic upheavals, and mega-explosions. Time swirled uniquely around him. He felt two trajectories at once—like a stone cast into the deep lake of time, sinking down to the bottom where all life may have begun, as well as the outward rippling cat’s paw upon its surface. History. Present. Future. All there, his for the grappling.

Alone he headed south: crossing over what one day would be named the Bering land bridge. Well-suited to the task, weighing close to 400 pounds, the norm then, he ran through a dense mantle of cold and silence. In the morning light his rust-colored coat appeared red, broken only by dotted circular cave-black rosettes. The travel was hard, but the jaguar came into it, growing stronger as he went—proof he’d done the right thing by giving his instinct its due.

After months of traveling, and though he was not cold, his body began to shiver. Prescience told him change was imminent seconds before a rogue wind thrust the jaguar into a zigzag shudder of time, as if the stone sinking deep into the lake had jerked off course and suddenly crabbed sideways. Calling on everything he had by stirring up wells of power contained within him, the jaguar fought against this unknown force he could not fathom.

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Now the Truth Can Be Told

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Gullette

Featured Art: by Francis Augustus Lathrop

While I was assailed by a gaggle of captious sighs
you were somewhere else groping for lost teeth
or something or otherwise empty of solace, of course.

Or the time my edges all fell away taking
gritty treads and guy wires with them, where were you?
Breathing ethereal! Moonstruck!

Jesu! Did you think I couldn’t see you
slithering down the pike on your twenty axles,
the wind in your snoot, the coontail aflap flopping

in as crisp a tornado as any whip since
the blow that beveled Dubuque? Eh?
God knows you have failed me in need,

in time, in every intrusion of ice through my
window or down my back, every
whine of the plastic slug through my inner ear.

Do you think my patience is gold as glue,
sturdy as wings, marmot, asleep in your own aura?
Gelatinous posture! Asterisk! Aspic! Strip for your lashes!

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Nobody Can Pronounce the Name of This Volcano

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Paweł Czerwiński

I was choosing a bag of almonds at the grocery
when a volcano erupted. These almonds
were an impulse buy, and now they commemorate
catastrophe. The volcano is elsewhere,
so I won’t experience cinders bruising the sky.
On another continent ash settles on buildings
and my snack is dusted in cocoa powder,
the packaging says semi-sweet. I’m realizing
this is the wrong flavor for a natural disaster.
Nobody can pronounce the name of this volcano.
I can’t speak its name and I want to know it,
to know destruction, the reality of molten
rock. Instead I’m standing around the store,
befuddled by almonds, by how to choose.
If enough pressure built under the surface,
I could be relieved of every decision.

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A Friend Encourages Me to Travel to South America

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Bertha E. Jaques

I can’t handle cherries. When I see
them at the store, full of tart surprise,
I pass them up; it’s the breaking of tight
skin and release of flesh. I want
the thing ten steps down from the ecstatic.
Instead of cherries, cherry soda.
So how could I handle South America?
What would I do with a sea, with salt
air winding through me like a shell?
I live the nub of life, the thumbnail
sketch, fish sticks and cigarettes.
I would never survive the cherries
of South America. What’s a cherry
soda after a cherry? What do I dream of
after Brazil?

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Nomenomancy

.Reading time 3 minutes.

—divination by names

By Mark Wagenaar

Like each of us, it could only guess at its own begetting. A careless cigarette, electrical spark, Molotov cocktail hurled by an angry senior who had his letter to the editor rejected, we never found out how the fire started. Only smoke suddenly billowing above the town. Shreds of ten thousand newspapers upon the air, in slow drift through open windows, coming to rest on the eyelids & lips of men sleeping off the night shift at the furnace. Embers floated for hours through the streets, through back alleys, & ended up in the black fur of cats, gray hair of old men playing checkers, on the tongues of children who didn’t know better. A shroud upon the impatiens & petunias in tire & barrel gardens, on the feathers of pigeons in rooftop cages. In the silos the tatters found space amid the grains, & our news made it across the oceans: liquidation sales, stories on the alderman’s affair, the mayor’s new dog. And one death—one obituary. Larry, the boy who jumped his dirt bike into the canal. His name now upon the air, with our questions for him. We looked up at a sky that whirled with clouds of his name, & saw on that air once more the arc of his bike between the bridge and the rest of his life. His name rained down upon us, confetti for a parade of his absence. For years we found his name—in our underwear drawers, in our cereal boxes, in the big hair of our pageant contestants. In the open bags of sugar in the Home Ec classroom, the ones that girls would name and care for, & come to remember when their own babies were held up, his half-burned name against the brilliance of the sugar crystals, these sugar babies, each one named Larry.

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Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Scott Gould

Featured Art: by Oscar Bluemner

Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.

I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.

“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Mrs. Tisdale says. “I feel it.”

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Men’s League as January

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

Featured Art: by Mark Landman

After we untie skate laces wound twice
around our ankles and knotted
like the ribbon of a plastic kitchen garbage bag,

and we pop our cold-socked feet from
stiff black Tacks and Grafs
like hard pits from leathery dates,

all the blood worked up in thighs
screws down our shins and
floods our numb feet new again.

We laugh through clenched teeth at the charge
and fuzz of it, our toes
swelling round to halogen bulbs and

buzzing with a filament of joyful pain,
that brittle wire.
Burning cold they

might shatter so in old gray sneakers we
hobble to the parking lot,
at the open trunk of Ryan’s gray Corolla wobble

under sweaty hats and clouds of breath
and dispute the long-gone referees
with Narragansett cans till midnight.

We cough. We kick a snowbank.
Our neck hairs
icen to filigrees. Geno
glows in a T-shirt. What bright glass,
this golden crescent of beer in a can rim
yearning to freeze.

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Midnight Snack with Leon

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: by nrd

I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.

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Just Say No

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Feliphe Schiarolli

We didn’t say a word when the officer visited our classroom.
We didn’t pass a note or mumble, didn’t blink when the TV
flickered on, when the stats, wrapped in white, settled
on the screen. We didn’t dare color outside the lines
of the worry-eyed cartoon character buying weed from a teenage
bully or the gang of stick figures shouting in the margins.

We pretended not to see each other,
not to know the smell of bong smoke, late at night,
how it would drift through the air vents with their
laughter, how it would rise in a fog as we slept.

We pretended not to flinch when the egg hit the pan,
the yolk thundering against the cladded aluminum,
or when the officer pointed to the display of syringes
on the screen, the scenes of cherubic teens
snorting a line for the first time, the background darkening,
their eyes, lifeless, because the result is death,
the officer said, while pointing to a photo of a casket.

We pretended not to know how the dead could rise,
how they rose each morning to put away our cereal boxes
and make our beds, how they were waiting for us now
in their long white robes smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye, their tired bodies floating across the pearly
linoleum floors, the bones in their fingers thrumming
the edge of the kitchen sink to the sound of Clarence Clemons
in their heads, “The Promised Land” rising like a dark cloud 
from the desert floor, their eyes lost in the throbbing
autumnal light, the snaking of branches across
the kitchen window, the tick-tock of the wind against
the leaves, how it feels like eternity, as they watch
for the bus, the broken ice maker buzzing,
the dishwasher rumbling, milk parting their burned coffee,
waiting for their children to return to them
to wipe their small skulls clean.

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Coronation with Plastic Flowers

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Karl Blossfeldt

She says it feels like flowers blooming in her veins.
                                The lilies watch her, unmoved
in the window.
                                She becomes the petals’
white polyester sheen, its rigid spine, slumped posture
                                leaning against the rim
of an old coffee mug filled with week-old cigarette butts.
                                This is how
I will remember her: bottles of pills, the walls scumbled
                                yellow, a flower blooming
in her veins, her gray breath rising

                                in a haze thirty years ago
the way she placed each plastic flower away from
                                the sun, the sting, anything
that could touch the color of the petal as if the light
                                could drag each one into the white,
worn sky, make it fade before her eyes. What else is beauty for?
                                but to be spun, set on a window sill
curtains drawn, petals hugged in dust, as she slept,
                                no sun to tell her if it was day or night,
the three of us kids trying to keep still, feeling our way
                                through the dark dreamt room,
unable to understand that this was the tick-tock of time.
                                 This was what it meant
to live forever.

                  Only nothing lives forever.
                                                The perfect moment—

the gardenias in full bloom
                                chatter staggering through a promenade,
the quivering flit of sparrows chasing
                                the listless light of noon
until suddenly even this ends,
                                 until suddenly a car alarm ruins everything,
the chatter dissolves into people
                                 screaming over each other,
birds fleeing, the owner trying to turn the damn thing off.

               Maybe there were too many moments
that could never stay quiet or whole in her hands
               like the day we took
our first steps, said our first words, or the day
               she fell in love,
slept all night in his open arms, dreamt of the way
               he looked at her as the ocean
wind tossed her floral dress,
               dreamt of the way time could stop,
only to wake up and find every living thing
               changed in some way

everything except
               the flowers in her hands.

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At the Edge of Everything

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Traci Skuce

Featured Art: by Alex Pasarelu

For the past hour, Alli had been sitting against the small oak, her eighteen-month-old son latched to her breast. His molars had finally—thank God— broken through, and now he suckled, cheeks sticky and eyes lolling with pleasure. Alli had hoped another mom would show up. Jeannie was off visiting her parents in Vancouver and Clay, well he was just plain off, so she hadn’t had an adult conversation in days. She wanted someone, anyone, to gab with about the impossibility of lost sleep, errant husbands, and teething. But there were only the crows, waddling around the rim of a garbage can, diving in for pizza crusts then flying off across the playground to the giant cedar.

Alli’s daughter, Tavia, looked at the birds from under her floppy sunhat, and then dumped a handful of sand onto an accumulating pile, patted it down. Alli mimed eating, mumbled yum-yum as she had been since they’d arrived. “Do you like it Mommy?” Without waiting for an answer, Tavia ran back to the production center beneath the slide.

Jack continued suckling. Both breasts were drained and she’d become a giant pacifier. His eyelids fluttered and his blond feathery hair stuck to his forehead, ear crusted with milk and peanut butter. She picked at it, and he swatted her, still sucking hard. Enjoy them while they’re young, people said, but she couldn’t wait to toss these days onto the slag heap of motherhood.

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Cousin Scott on Food Stamps

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: ‘The Thirty-Six Star Flag of the United States of America’ by unknown

—in memory of Scott Christopher Maxwell
1961–2007

First thing is, I got as much right to get my foodstamps
as the next man. Second thing is, what I make of em
is my own Han Solo. State aint got no right
comin around sniffin halfway up my ass, tryin to catch
some little whiff of a goddamn infringement.
If I wanna fetch my breakfast with em, fine,
let a cowboy fry his bacon. If I wanna sell em for cash
or trade em for dope, that’s my own Han Solo.
You think I’m gettin rich outta this?
You think I’m puttin some greenbacks away someplace?
Saint me somebody if I’m flush in more than bellybutton lint.
And anyways I’m only sellin em to veterans.
That’s the third thing. A lotta vets can’t even get
no foodstamps, and you mind tellin me why?
You think them boys went off and lost a leg
in Iraq or some other ass crack of the planet
just to come back home to trade me a dime-sack
and some percocet? What? So they can hobble
their broke ass down to Deals Only and garner themselves
with nothin but a stone cold bite of somethin to eat?
You tell me. Me, I don’t even wanna guess.
And the other thing is, what’s the difference
if I got two-three a them food cards?
Who am I hurtin? I’m askin you––who am I hurtin?
And I know right off what you’re gonna lay on me.
You think I’m reachin in and stealin them tax dollars
right out your own privately owned ass crack.
But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.
Where you think all them sorry ass one-legged vets
is comin back from? Disneyland?
War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.
Course, neither is foodstamps. Lord’s got two hands
and he aint askin for handouts with neither of em.
And you can bet your whole hard-on
he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped
prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.
Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.
Real slow and easy. Sorta callin you in
without callin, cept maybe with the wind.
And your job’s as simple as goin to him, cause you’re lost
and you know it. And that’s the same shake
them vets was expectin to get when they come back
one-legged, but they didn’t get that, did they?
No they didn’t. Got percocet. And they’ll be dosin that shit
till the day they’re dead. What’s that old sayin?
Send me home in my casket. Well, tell you what,
the minute I’ve gone and dropped off dead
and been laid to rest, you got my god’s honest say-so
to bust open my casket and stick a straw
up my ass and suck and see if you find any flavors
that taste just even a little bit like your goddamn tax dollars.

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Last Seen on a Milk Carton

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Reese Conner

Featured Art: by Sebald Beham

In the photo on the left, the first Jesus poses
with a thorny crown scratching his skull
and his right arm slung around the cross
as if he and the cross are friends
or first-time prom dates,
while his mane, miraculous, immaculately
tumbles to his shoulders
in loose curlicues, the bounce of which
you can easily imagine
though scarcely believe
considering the dry, desert air,
and his skin (that skin!) is a goldilocks-bronze,
is light enough
not to alarm the whites
is dark enough
not to alarm the historians,
and his eyes are trustworthy
and inevitable—you don’t get to say
you’re the son of God
with any old eyes, no,
they need to be
more lamblike than lifelike—

meanwhile, in the photo on the right,
the second Jesus, age-progressed
two millennia since he went missing,
is a skeletal heap. And you begin to think
how sad it must be
that they keep looking for him.

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The Resort

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Preston Martin

He paces, half naked,
across his second-floor balcony,
phone against his ear.

A translucent mist moves on shore,
the swoosh of high tide hardly heard
across mannered dunes.

As the day moon hangs
over his building fresh sunlight sinks
low in the moist air like a lemon slice in soda,
sparkling dewy marigolds, dollar weeds.

The man paces, turns, punctuates
thoughts with a free hand, either
pleading or singing into the phone.
Please

let it be to an old love,
who loved him on this beach, loved him once,
on a tender morning like this morning.

Still now, he stares at the phone,
as if it were sentient, caring,
as if the conversation still goes on,

as if the greater part of life
isn’t our suitcase of memories,
handled everywhere,
the calling back

of times slipped through fingers,
the calling back
what can’t come back.

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Sneakers

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Patrick Crerand

Featured Art: ‘blue sneakers’

My father never exercised. He chased me upstairs after a fresh word at the dinner table once or twice—quick sprints that ended with a face-slap photo finish—but no trips to the gym, hardly even a ball game on TV. On weekends, he wore sneakers—not tennis shoes—always sneakers, as if that’s what one did to hide silently from the world of sport.

But that day—my sixth birthday—after he made the cake and gave me the Frisbee, he said to my surprise, “Let’s see if it spins.” I was out the door in the backyard before he had laced up the first shoe. Neither one of us was very good, but there we stood, spinning the bee in front of the sugar snap peas he had planted, when we heard Aaron, the boy next door, scream in a high, inhuman pitch—a cartoonish noise I thought only diving eagles made, or the ricochet of bullets in old westerns. I almost laughed. My father knew better. He straightened and ran toward Aaron in the side yard between the houses. He leapt over the chainlink gate with a quick hop, following behind the crying boy until he caught him by the arm and saw where Aaron was pointing. “What?” my father asked.

“My sister,” Aaron screamed.

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Detective Story

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: by sir Edwin Landseer

When I worked as a janitor at the courthouse
I met a detective in the Sheriff’s department
whose son, I learned, had committed suicide
some months earlier. Having lost a son myself
in a car-train collision, I tried to offer my condolences.
“Your boy kill himself?” the detective asked bluntly.
“We never knew,” I replied. The detective grunted
noncommittally and opened his desk drawer to take out
a photo of his son, a young man in his twenties, kneeling
and embracing a dog as he grinned for the camera.
“Two days before it happened,” the detective said.
“About the same age as our son,” I said.
The detective stared at the photo for a moment.
“You got a dog?” he asked.
“Two,” I said.
“Thing about a dog,” he said, “a person can screw up
a hundred ways, and his dog will love him when he can’t
even love his self.”
“Our son’s dog still sleeps at the foot of his bed,” I said.
The detective turned the photograph over on its face
and glanced up at me, his eyes as cold as stars.
“Ain’t his dog,” he said. “It’s mine.”

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Sunny Day

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: ‘Woman Lying in the Dunes near Noordwijk’ Jan Toorop

Verweile doch, du bist so schön.
—Goethe

I grab the young, unruly day
and say, Stand still, stand still.
I want to comb her hair and dress her up,

but she just laughs and wriggles in my grasp
and breaks away. She dances mockingly,
just out of reach, the little imp,

and runs ahead of me. I’m running
out of energy to try
to catch her in my arms,

warm, fragrant child,
her changeling eyes lit up
with winter sun.

Come here, you darling day,
and stay with me
a while, a little while.

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Of Course Death

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Roy Mash

Of course death is on its way,
       and life’s a blink,
and yes the unexamined one sucks,
       and doubtless
we’re well-advised, periodically,
       to expose ourselves
to the nuisance of these truths,
       waggling their
fingers with their thumbs in
       their ears, ever
heckling us with the raspberry
        of our mortality.

Still, we cannot carpe every diem,
       squeegee the universe
of each last moment, shovel our
       noses 24/7 into
the coffee or the roses or
       what-have-you.
Virgin-bedding stratagems aside,
       some days, maybe
even most days, the unforgiving
       minute’s happy
just to be left alone, frittered
       on some dopey
soap opera, or stewing over
       a parking ticket.

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