Author: newohioreviewonlineissues

One Solid Chassis Among Us

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Image: Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth by Martin Johnson Heade, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

We praised the gray car for being a good little mule
the day before it roared demands. The labs
for my sister’s knee surgery came back showing dual
heart chambers out of whack. And right-left jabs
of exploding joints and breast removal for me
came one year after both my husband’s eyes
lost cataracts, gained corneas. The knee
still needs to be replaced, of course. So why
not buy a new car? Certainly we could
transport our patchwork selves in our patchwork car,
all very apt, and prudently get the good
of what’s left. Or, while granting how things are,
we could fling cash, climb in with gleeful smiles,
and ride shiny the remaining miles.

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Looney Tunes

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: Summer Morning by David Lucas, 1830

Nah, it’s not that, I wouldn’t call it that, I mean molested
that’s like TV stuff, and Brenna
she’d be real nice sometimes like flesh and blood should.
Bring me back a chocolate frosty just because.
Anyway, I’d just as soon say we’re done,
or you want I should go through it all like I did in June
with the last one? Twice now—and this just goes to show
the system’s jacked—twice I’ve waited, asked the front desk ladies
and waited, I said people I need a little help and you’re telling me two hours?
In all this hospital you’re telling me there’s no one I can talk to now?
I said what about the dude mopping floors? Is he around?
Can I talk to him? Or do I go ahead and slit my wrists right here?
So they hauled me up to you, another white coat
working the psych ward. A woman. What’s up with that?
No offense or nothing. That’s just how they do me
down on first-floor, where everyone else on earth is. You ever one of those
ER docs I see running around? The way I figure it, a woman like you
doesn’t need to run. You’re all put together—you know, like a car
that’s just come off the line . . . . But okay, this isn’t about you.

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Inspiration

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Image: Mountain Landscape with Bridge by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783/1784
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

                                                                                                     Intellectual: Anyone who can listen to Gio-
                                                                                                     achino Rossini’s William Tell Overture with-
                                                                                                     out thinking of the Lone Ranger.
                                                                                                                                  —Laurie Taylor, sociologist

Sometimes I picture that foppish, fat Gioachino Rossini—
with his brocade shoes, his velvet-collared jacket and his satin vest.
But mostly I think of him stepping over the ocean, smiling
and rubbing his chubby palms and then, inexplicably,
standing on the porch of a modest family farm
and looking out at Bald Rock Dome or Sugar Pine Peak.
Beside him a poorish, but kindly, but cowardly widower
explains that just that morning a band of filthy varmints
burned his barn and shook him down for the last of his cash
and his only cow. Rossini listens but begins to hum

and just as he turns from the farmer to gaze back at the mountains
two handsome men gallop up and dismount.
The first, the one with the matching six-guns,
and black mask and elegant horse,
hands the farmer his recovered money.
The second man, his sidekick, a quiet Indian
dressed in buckskin and moccasins says:
Bad men go jail.
We ride kemo sabe?
Yes, Tonto, says the mysterious rider
and pausing only to wave
the two men speed away in a cloud of dust.
Once again the Italian Mozart looks out at the mountains
and begins to hum. Who was that stranger with the mask?
he asks, I wanted to thank him.

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That’s Me Smiling in the Back Row

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Image: The Parthenon by Frederic Edwin church, 1871

The day warms up fast,
Like leftovers in a microwave, odors of dawn
Still rising from the dead lilies,
From dry grass bleached to blonde and now
Heading toward platinum.
In the slow burn of midsummer,
The nose takes you where the mind won’t go.

There’s bad juju all over the place.
Light clings like cellophane
To the limp leaves. Nothing will budge
That carpet of shadows on the back porch.
I’m watching a spider
Rappel from the blades of a broken fan.
Somebody needs to fix it soon,
Somebody who knows how to work a miracle
With Juicy Fruit and a steak knife.

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May B

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Lois Taylor

Featured Image: Young Ladies of the Village by Gustave Courbet, 1851-2

The last thing May B ever wanted was to be stuck with Tweety, who is standing there in her halter top and shorts, frowning at the yowling cat.

“Run that by me again, where you got her?” says Tweety.

May B explains how the stray came to the door just before her mom got sick and the aid car had to take her away again, and her mom said the cat was pregnant but way too young to have kittens.

Now the cat begins to twitch. “She’s going to die,” says May B. “She doesn’t even have a name.”

“Who’s talking about dying,” says Tweety. “Help me get that baby ready.”

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Venus Out on the Town

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Shakira Croce

Featured Image: Charlotte, Lady Watkin Williams-Wynne by Daniel Gardner, 1775
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Yes, you may buy me
A drink

It has been a long week for me too
At work trading, you said?

No, you haven’t had much?
Experience in social enterprise

Isn’t it great we live in a country
Where you and your partners can pull such fine bootstraps

One of the brightest, yes
I’ve been told I have a nice smile among other things

Your lines show in a few more years
Your advances will be harmless, cute even

Thank you for the champagne
What did you say your name was?

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The Tenants of Feminism

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Denise Duhamel

Featured Image: The Valley of the Seine, from the Hills of Giverny by Theodore Robinson, 1892

When the interviewer mishears “tenets”
I know my gals are not in a villa,
never mind the United States Senate.

My heroines crowd in drab tenements,
their image scaring even Attila
the Hun. The interviewer hears “tenants”—

bad asses, public housing. Bob Bennett
wakes sweaty from a nightmare, Guerrilla
Girls rushing the United States Senate;

Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, and Joan Jett
stuffing manifestos in manila
mailers. The interviewer hears “tenants,”

sees kitchens where women cook venomous
dishes. His lady smells of vanilla,
minding their house, not the U.S. Senate.

My principles are not set in cement,
nor are they adrift on a flotilla.
I call upon all feminist “tenants”—
Steer your U-Hauls to the U.S. Senate.

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We Are All Beyond Disgusting

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Kato

Featured Image: Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslw Homer, 1876
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

I like to get to the ship early. You’ll usually find a couple of old-timers waiting by the bar, itching to sip a Tom Collins or a whiskey sour on the rocks and get their vacation started right. This is the best time to build rapport and I’m their gal. At this point, they’re still excited about their trip and have a thick wad of cash in their billfolds. Their wives are in their cabins getting settled or making appointments at the spa or booking excursions for when we dock. The bar is quiet and they have me all to themselves. They can pour out all their troubles, and I can pour them all the liquor they need, at heavily marked-up prices. I haven’t even finished restocking the tabasco and maraschino cherries when a salty dog of a guy walks in. His name is Jerry and he’s on board to celebrate his wife’s sixty-fifth birthday. I ask him what he does, and he says he used to own a manufacturing company in the fashion district but now he’s retired. Left the business to his son. He says he built his company from scratch. Even though his shirt is ugly and has hula girls on it, I tell him I like it. I tell all men I like their shirts. I garnish his glass with an orange slice and tell him I admire men like him, self-made men who do things like run their own companies. And I do.

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The Lake

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured Image: Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay by Fitz Henry Lane, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

As usual, it was easy to accept the lake
and its surroundings,
to take at face value the colonies of reeds
along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,
a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,
and the big surface of the lake itself,
the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.

Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone
even vaguely familiar with the role
of the picturesque in American
landscape painting of the 19th century
would feel perfectly at home in its presence.

And that is why I felt so relieved
to discover in the midst of all this
a note of skepticism,
a touch of whimsy,
or call it a bit of Dadaist playfulness;
and if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde
then surely a sign of the human was apparent

in the casual fuck-you attitude
so perfectly expressed by the anhinga
that was drying its extended wings
in the morning breeze
while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.

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Regarding Isabelle Huppert

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Tom Whalen

Featured Image: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495-1505

Yesterday as I reread Hubert Hoskin’s translation of C. A. van Peursen’s Leibniz (1966/69), I couldn’t help but think of Isabelle Huppert. As with Leibniz, experience alone cannot account for her performances, but I don’t think, regarding Isabelle Huppert, I need concern myself with eternal truths residing in the mind of God. Judge advocate, nun, prostitute, mother, dressmaker, postal clerk, piano teacher, scientist, abortionist, war bride, writer, hostage, thief—whatever the role or source (Euripides, Diderot, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant, Conrad, James, Zamyatin, Crnjanski, Genet, Bataille, Duras, Highsmith, Bachmann, Rendell, Jim Thompson), energies feed the performances of Isabelle Huppert from without and within.

Have you seen many of her over one hundred films? Retour à la bien-aimée, for example, or Eaux profondes, Pas de scandale, Sans queue ni tête, La séparation? Are you older or younger than Isabelle Huppert?

At the door to the house of Isabelle Huppert one stands as if before a tabernacle of dreams. Have you, too, stood before the tabernacle of Isabelle Huppert, or perhaps even entered its elegant chambers, which others before and after you have also entered? I confess I have not, though I am convinced I can say without equivocation that the house of Isabelle Huppert is capacious, albeit modestly so.

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On His Way in Finding the World

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dennis Sampson

Featured Image: The Lackawanna Valley by George Iness, 1856, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

He was a person. He put
one foot in front of the other and often
thought of himself before thinking of others,
tried at times to ask a woman whom he loved
what he had done wrong and sobbed
during a counseling session in a back room of
a Catholic church when his wife made it clear she
did not want him to touch her. He smoked,
wrote in enclosures that were cold, that were sweltering,
and celebrated his modest accomplishments
by drinking alone in a bar in Cleveland,
infuriating those who did not like his kind
of frankness. When his mother
died slowly after a stroke he felt nothing. The singularly
vivid iridescent streak of sunlight in late afternoon in October
inspired him to write. He never forgot
the aroma of Mennen after-shave permeating the hallway
when his father left the bathroom, or the sweet fragrance
of lilacs growing in all corners of their yard. A person.
And he once held a leopard frog in his palms and was
startled by how desperately it wanted to get out.

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Rumors About Dread Mills

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rodney Jones

Featured Images: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade by Claude Monet, 1894, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

1974

At last they have him in church, a short service and the family silent, but the moments after the funeral are like a test.

True: The new base-tube press at Lockland Copper weighed sixty-seven tons. When they had completed the building and brought it in the door, six engineers agreed they would have to lift the roof to get the crane in and lower it into the pit. He heard from Tip Smith, a drinking buddy, a welder on the job, and wrote the board, saying he would do it for 10,000. Went to the ice plant, ordered eigh- teen blocks, filled the pit, rolled the press onto the ice; then, as the ice melted, pumped out the water.

True: Drunk every day for sixteen years. False: Mostly homebrew or moon- shine.

True: Every morning Maurice Orr’s rooster pissed him off. False: He caught the rooster in a sack, dug a hole behind the house, buried it with just the neck and head sticking out, cranked the mower, and mowed the lawn.

False: The story that besotted on the back lawn he ordered Jawaharal to dance and choreographed the steps with a Colt revolver. (Gunsmoke.)

True: Jawaharal inherited his logic gene and argued when he called him “Jerry.”

False: He never hit a lick at a snake. Once he pruned the grapevine. Twice, after midnight, he picked roasting ears from Leldon Spence’s garden.

True: When the money from the press job ran out, he wrote bad checks until his name was published on the glass doors of every business from Cold Springs to Decatur. It hit him then one day: go from store to store, copy all the names, print the list of deadbeats twice a year and sell subscriptions to each store for fifty dollars.

True: His Deadbeat Protection Flier taking off before the Credit Protection Act: drinking Jim Beam in the air over Georgia and Louisiana, he was a sloppy man who made a million dollars.

True: The gay son home from Palo Alto. The wife, a holy roller in a sari. His brilliant, inebriated redneck math, marks in the chicken yard. The liver. The heart—details of the unannotated life: grease-prints on Erdös in Combinator- ics, unused tickets to see Conway Twitty—Cliffs Notes for Abyss Studies—

His mind at the end like a hand reaching for a pocket when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“I would kill myself if there were anyone better.”

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The Ends of Stories

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Loeb

Featured Image: Soir d’hiver à Montmartre (Winter Evening in Montmartre) by Jean-Alexis-Joseph Morin-Jean, 1910; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

At the finish of the meal, your father left. And that was that.

I led a reckless life, but when the accident happened, I reformed.

So I discovered that the bananas had to be really ripe.

The bouquet was a wet bathing suit moldering in a gym bag
tossed in the corner last month.

The lost earring with the green stone turned up years later
when they moved the dresser. She’d thrown out the matching one
a decade earlier.

The smell was a casserole forgotten on the counter. Something with tuna
and onions. It greeted them when they returned from vacation.

I plan to beat the odds and live forever, he declared.

The cat was hiding in the top drawer of the bureau, flattened
as thin as a comic book, eyes peering up, blinking, when we
finally found him.

Turned out it was a moth as big as a bat making those shadows
on the cabin wall.

She went shopping for a jacket covered in feathers, just as it had
appeared in her dream.

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BBC

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Image: View of Toledo by El Greco, 1599-1600

I leave the World Service
on at night, snoozing through
the British iteration of gang rape
and kidnapping. I’ll stir sometimes
to hear a few moments of economic
collapse, but it’s really white noise,
blanching the laughter of drunks outside.
Sleeping to tragedy helps tamp down
my father’s last days, his morphine speech,
how my mother sent me to Kentucky
Fried Chicken with a coupon
for his last meal, and how shame
drove me to throw the coupon out.
If his death were broadcast in the night,
his of thousands of dying fathers,
and you slept well, how could
I begrudge you a night of rest?

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Where My Father Went

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When the funeral director hands my father’s ashes to my mother, she puts the little cardboard box into her pocketbook—the one with all the zippers and buckles. My mother says she’ll hold off on scattering the ashes until maybe the next time my brother comes down from his farm and we’re all together. Maybe we’ll scatter them in the ocean.

“But, for now,” I ask, “Where are you going to put him?”

“In my bedroom closet,” she says.

My parents never shared a bedroom. My father’s room was the converted attic, my mother’s, the converted garage. As far away as they could get from each other within the same house. Putting him in her bedroom closet seems, at once, too remote and too intimate, but I don’t say anything.

Two years pass.

My brother only visits on Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is not the right time to scatter the ashes. It’s never the right time to scatter the ashes.

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Someone Else

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Image: Roses by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When my mother was dying, we started calling her “Grammy” as if she’d become someone else. She was eighty-five pounds. She looked like a shrinkydink of herself. She wore a diaper and a hospital gown. The diaper looked enormous on her. It was one of those pull-up ones. If you yanked up her diaper when she was trying to stand, you could lift her right off her feet. “Whoa,” she’d say to you. “Whoa there.” Grammy was a good sport. She was nothing like my mother.

She was on morphine, so a lot of the time, she made no sense. “You know,” she’d tell me earnestly, “I gotta get me a Louie-Louie.”

“Okay,” I’d tell her, but I didn’t have a clue what she meant. “I’ll buy you one.”

“Don’t get it too small,” she’d say. “Oooh,” she’d kind of shiver with excitement, “That will be lovely.” Lovely. As if my mother would ever say a word like that.

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My Mother Comes to Dinner

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Image: Green Plums by Joseph Decker, 1885
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

We leave the dining room and she remains
alone at the table; the plates need washing,
we prepare dessert. I still wait for her

questions, half-buried in dish-clatter,
her broken tones in the hot kitchen air,
though these days she sits mostly silent.

And larger than the room and yellow walls, her silence—
as though it were strung to the sky,
to the air that too has been washed and washed

like a bed sheet in the relentless sun,
colors and patterns mostly faded

like all the meals enjoyed then washed
from these brown earthenware plates.

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Jester’s Cap

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Brandon Amico

Featured Image: Corridor in the Asylum by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun.

Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun and the first
rabbit a vase of imported flowers.

One of the rabbits is already drunk.

Three rabbits walk into an orgy but only for the pre-orgy hors d’oeuvres.

Three rabbits walk into a bar with masks on but their ears give them away.

Knock-knock. (Who’s there?) No one, it’s just the second rabbit, the one with a
free hand, rapping his knuckle on the bartop.

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Banality

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Image: Tullichewan Castle, Vale of Leven, Scotland by Sir James Campbell of Strathro, 1855
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

There’s something to be said for banality,
the way it keeps everything on a level plane,
one cliché blithely following another
like cows heading toward the pasture.

How lovely sometimes not to think
about Russian Futurism, or the second law
of thermodynamics, or how thinking itself
requires some thoughtfulness.

I’d like to ask if Machiavelli
ever owned a dog named “Prince.”
I’d like to imagine Rosalind Franklin
lounging pleasantly by a wood stove.

Let the mind take a holiday,
the body put its slippers on.
It’s a beautiful day, says the banal,
and today, I’m happy to agree
with its genial locutions.

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Nowadays

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Rowe Michaels

Featured Image: A Basket of Clams by Winslow Homer, 1873

And is that everything
since you? Since meaning
posthumous.
                      Here melancholy’s
interrupted by brief flirt
with dictionary: originally
postumas, no hint
of burial in living earth.

Dicking around again with
missing you, post this and that—
coital, colonial, menopausal,
Mesozoic, coitus interruptus . . .
Nowadays sex is catch-all for
almost anything, god, war,
cupcakes, abs and apps, the boat
is listing.
                Poet Gilbert, Jack, said
“the erotic matters not as pleasure
but a way to get to something
darker.” He’s restless
when people laugh a lot,
he prefers Greek fishermen,
who “do not play on the beach.”
Is it so wrong to heft
an inflatable ball, twirl it
on a finger, think circus seals?

Wasn’t sex mostly three-ring
circus—three or more, given
the presence of memory, fantasy,
irony, flattery, usury, syzygy—
that’s sun, moon, earth aligned,
and then there’s the all-but-impossible
synergy, two becoming a
greater third,
                       yes, Nowadays
is everything since that.

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Harping

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Rowe Michaels

Featured Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

While most of us are grieving

something—cold spring lost child dead-end
lyrics that won’t resolve,

the spadefoot toad, who bears
a gold lyre-mark on her back,
is crazy-busy with what science calls

explosive breeding. Rain says Go,
and up from culvert cistern over porch and patio across roads
the fraught migration of spadefeet slowly breaches
our borders to breed in our ponds.

Flood of toadlets in just three weeks, pop pop,
with tiny golden harps, how will this
end? We run them down
coming or going, then pronounce them
rare, so we

love them, make posters, poems—
      (Old moss-grown pond—a
      toad jumps in to breed pop pop
      poppoppoppoppop)

We can’t say they’re unnatural, or blame
the job rate bad schools gang wars (unprotected
sex?), but tiny golden harps

seem suspect artsy irresponsible un-American.
All night trill thrills,

while most of us are grieving.

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Feature: Uses & Abuses of Dialogue

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The following is a collection of essays and writings on the subject of dialogue within fiction. Including an essay from author Rebecca Makkai (Music for Wartime, The Hundred-Year House) about a college assignment of eavesdropping to craft realistic dialogue. As well, audio of Robert Anthony Siegel reading “I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction.”

A Trompe L’Oeil for the Mind’s Ear

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By J. Robert Lennon

Featured Image: Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1867

The key to writing realistic dialogue in fiction is to abandon all presumption of authenticity and acknowledge the necessity of total fakeness in achieving the illusion of truth.

Human speech is not simple. The words we say in conversation convey, at best, 25% of what we mean,1 with the remaining 75% taken up by body language, volume and tone, facial expression, and prior understanding between parties. The fiction writer has access to these conversational elements, of course, and may fill in back story, provide stage direction, and apply (judiciously, lord help us) descriptive dialogue tags to convey the intended meaning. But a good writer can evoke the character of a speaker, his or her intended and actual meaning, and even very subtle contextual clues, using only the words within quotation marks.

Among the tools the writer has at her disposal when writing dialogue: Sentence length. Punctuation. Rhythm (along an axis of consistency, from entirely smooth to completely broken). Syntax and diction (specifically, its breadth, expressive sophistication, and degree of formal correctness). The reader should be able to understand who is speaking in the same way that he requires no assistance to identify, by sound alone, the voices of his friends in a crowded room.

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Inside the Cave-Speak of Saunders

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Leslie Daniels

Featured Image: Still Life by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

The setting in George Saunders’ story “Pastoralia” is a theme park where two characters—the narrator and Janet—live and work in a simulated cave. Their job is to perform for the occasional tourist the skinning and roasting of a goat. Theme park rules dictate that employees must not speak English at any time so as not to destroy the illusion of being cave people. The narrator abides by the rule, but Janet flouts it, which is a major concern of the narrator’s. On this occasion the freshly dead goat has not been delivered. There are no tourists present.

                              Janet comes in from her Separate Area and her eyebrows go up.

                                        “No freaking goat?” she says.

                                        I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big
                               rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away
                               in high hills, and as my fear was great, I did not follow.

                                        Janet scratches under her armpit and makes a sound like a mon-
                               key, then lights a cigarette.

                                        “What a bunch of shit,” she says. “Why do you insist, I’ll never
                               know. Who’s here? Do you see anyone here but us?”

                                        I gesture to her to put out the cigarette and make the fire. She
                               gestures to me to kiss her butt.

                                        “Why am I making a fire?” she says. “A fire in advance of a goat.
                               Is this like a wishful fire? Like a hopeful fire? No, sorry, I’ve had it.
                               What would I do in the real world if there was thunder and so on and
                               our goats actually ran away? Maybe I’d mourn, like cut myself with
                               that flint, or maybe I’d kick your ass for being so stupid as to leave the
                               goats out in the rain.”

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I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Robert Anthony Siegel

Featured Image: Landscape with Trees and Water by James Bulwer
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

The world I grew up in was full of hyper-verbal people for whom talk was the medium of both ambition and feeling, the tool they used to try to shape the world around their desires. For that reason, when I began writing fiction, I found that characters were never completely real to me until they spoke: when they started talking I finally knew what they wanted. So I started writing the dialogue first. I would get two characters talking to each other and then build the scene out from their conversation. The dialogue was the trunk, and everything else branched out from it: thought, feeling, memory, sense perception, action.

In those days, when a scene worked, I thought it was because the dialogue was good. It took years for me to realize that it was the other way around, that dialogue was just helping me to uncover the underlying conflict that actually drove the story. What I know now is that dialogue doesn’t have to be fancy or quirky or unusual in order to do its job effectively. It just has to arise freely and naturally from the characters’ experience of conflict.

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A Brief Personal History of Dialogue

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Kelly Luce

Featured Image: The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest’s Garden by John La Farge, 1887

                                                                                             Not everyone says what they mean. But they do
                                                                                             always say something designed to get what they
                                                                                             want.
                                                                                                                                                       —David Mamet

1987: Ms. Voyeur, my first-grade teacher, tells my mom I’m too quiet and should be seen by a psychiatrist. But I prefer listening! Other people are interesting. They tell you more secrets when you’re quiet.

1992: My Language Arts teacher accuses me of plagiarizing a short story  I wrote about volleyball tryouts. Why? “The dialogue is too realistic.” When I tell her that’s because I just tried out for volleyball myself and remembered how the girls sounded, she says, “No one learns to write dialogue by listening to real people talk.”

1997: I read Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” for the first time. Remember the conversation between returned soldier Seymour Glass and the young girl, Sybil, on the beach? Sybil is being perfectly herself, still possesses her childlike ability to say just what she means. Seymour is a couple hours away from—. Their chatter is innocent. Or is it terrifying? Take this exchange about a rubber raft:

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The Dialogue of Gesture and Silence

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Alyce Miller

Featured Image: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight by Claude Monet, 1894
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

What people don’t say is often as important as, or even more important than, what they do say. Too much exposition, or what I call “soap opera dialogue” (e.g. “You remember my brother John who tried to murder Tiffany, before she was caught stealing from Marsha’s cousin who changed her name….”), or its opposite, too little, as is often found in the “generic social glue” of the how’sthe-weather variety, can undermine the progression of story and essential character development (unless, of course, weather is key to the story).

We often think we learn about people through what they say and how they say it, but other forms of communication are just as crucial. Dialogue can happen without speech. Words can fail. Gesture can summon meaning beyond language.

In Hemingway’s dialogue-rich story set in an empty train station in Spain, “Hills Like White Elephants,” the two traveling protagonists he calls respectively “the man and the girl” carry on what might sound to the untrained ear like a conversation about nothing when, in fact, they are about to make an important decision as to whether “the girl” should have an abortion. Whichever path they choose, it is clear that the course of their life together will be forever changed. At one point, after a good deal of back and forth, the girl says, “Then I’ll do it because I don’t care about me.” When the man counters with “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way,” the girl doesn’t respond. Instead she stands up and walks to the end of the station. Her choice to substitute action for speech and distance herself momentarily from the man says more than anything she could at that moment. Her attention drifts instead to the landscape, the river on one side of the track and the mountains on the other, while she stands in that place of in-betweens and uncertainty. No conversation could convey her dilemma more precisely at that moment.

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Dialogue: The Footfall of Its Wandering

.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Darrell Spencer

Featured Image: The Card Players by Paul Cézanne, 1890-2

You might not have it in mind to go a particular
direction and you might end up going that way.
—tapper Jimmy Slyde

Well, that ain’t what art does. It makes things.
—Stanley Elkin

1.  Full Disclosure

For my entry into a discussion of dialogue I can’t think of a worthier writer to cite than Amy Hempel. The magician and maestro. Hempel’s narrator of Tumble Home opens the novella as one ought: “I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table” (69). Here are my cards: I like fiction that feels off-shot and shaggy, that seems to have fallen from the sky and is banged up thanks to re-entry. I like my fiction jerry-rigged and clumsy. Stanley Elkin uses the word baggy to describe his novels. Perfect.

Screw Poe: “A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him establishing this preconceived effect.” Oy. Rube Goldberg schooled me; he’s my guy. I want, as I read, to experience the acrobatics, to hear the pop and the hiss and the whiz-bang of the performance. A Goldberg contraption might get you somewhere but you will most likely be too dizzy to appreciate your arrival. You’ve seen those spaceships wobble across the screen in the crackly black-andwhite Flash Gordon flicks. That’s what I’m talking about. Look closely and you see the wires.

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That Dialogue Assignment

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Rebecca Makkai

Featured Image: la Orana Maria (Hail Mary) by Paul Gauguin, 1891

I first got The Assignment in a college playwriting class. You might have gotten it in high school, or picked it up from a writing exercise book (somewhere between Keep a Dream Journal and What Color Is Your Character’s Toothbrush?): Eavesdrop on strangers, and write down everything they say. The idea is that this will help you write better dialogue, more realistic dialogue. Because realistic must equal better.

To be honest, I fudged the college assignment somewhat. I listened in on two campus maintenance workers, thinking they’d say hilarious and off-color things. Mostly, they grunted about paneling. I cherry-picked my hour of listening for the best phrases, crunching them together into what sounded like three minutes of witty banter, adding a few lines of my own. I did this partly to make my classmates laugh (I knew we’d be reading this aloud the next day) but also because I sensed that there was something deeply unsatisfying about actual dialogue—uninspired, disorganized, mundane dialogue.

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The Light Factory

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

I work the night shift at the light factory.
The gears of the conveyor belt slip
silently, and emptiness goes by me
one segment at a time. I have to take
the dark in my gloved hands and make
something of it, then connect it to something else.
Someone further along the line bends
it, I think. Nobody really knows much about
the other guy’s job here. We just do our part.

There are no windows in this factory.
The air is like milk, and they pump in
music that has a beat, so we don’t fall asleep
on the job, but we still do. My mother says
I should get a real job, make something solid
out of my life. “There’s enough light
as there is,” she lectures me. “There’s the sun
and the stars,” she says, as if I don’t know this already.

“What do you DO in there?” she asks. I don’t want
to tell her how much we joke around, tell stories,
talk about men. “I can’t really describe it,”
I tell her. “I do it mostly by feel.” Sometimes,
I bring one of the seconds home
with me after my shift. They don’t like it
when you do this, but everyone sneaks some.
I go home at dawn, put it on my dresser
next to the open window, watch it fan
out like a wild thing into the pink sky.
I don’t know why it feels so good to let it go.

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POOF

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sandy Gingras

My mother wants her head to be frozen
after she dies. I’m against it, but
there’s no talking to her. She has a brochure.

On the cover, there’s a picture
of a white building with no windows.
I tell her, I go, “I’m never gonna visit you there.”

She says, “Fine, fine,” the way she does.
She reads me the whole brochure.
She’ll be maintained at something-something degrees

until they come up with the technology to defrost
her. The, she says, “POOF. It’ll be like
being microwaved.” I go, “Think about

what happens to popcorn.” She keeps on reading
about how they’ll just fiddle around with her DNA,
and she’ll grow a whole new body. I don’t get that part.

I go, “What if they can’t grow you a body,
and you’re stuck being an alive head forever.”
She says, “Then you’ll have to carry me around.”

I knew it. I knew it.

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The Undersized Negative

.Reading time 74 minutes.

By Robert Glick

Selected as winner of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender

Sometimes the day after Mom’s miscarriage, a chemistry teacher with chin-only stubble interrupts class to tell you he is dying. There were so many reasons not to be anywhere. I, Dr. Watermelon, convened everyone at the abandoned house, which I insisted on calling the sketch house, on account of the Etch A Sketch I had found in a toy chest. My buddy Filbert plopped himself down on one of the oyster chairs; the air clouded with dust mites and dried skin. “Finders, keepers,” he said. We demanded answers of the Harris family from phone bills and colanders, from the oregano scent of the bathroom cleaner, from a postal sack half-full of gas caps. The throat to the fireplace was choked; perhaps a bird’s nest. Rob and Ron each kept one eye perched on the doorless front door, wary of the patriarch Dustin Oskar Harris barging in to reclaim what he once owned. They thought the sketch house itself was sketchy, as if its waxy kitchen linoleum had been responsible for mawing open and swallowing its former occupants. Ron suggested that we get sizzled on the freon from the fridge. Rob agreed; they were repurposers. “Highly toxic,” Filbert said, reluctantly we transitioned to flicking matches at the shelves—flyfishing magazines, nautical books – knowing damp, expecting sulfur, anticipating cartwheels of burn through the air. Filbert, nicknamed for the teratomic testicle lodged like a moon above his kidney, had a talent for fire: me, not so much. I was a Pisces; I went as long as I could underwater.

Filbert’s lit match flew through the air and landed on my crotch. I didn’t want to move. I felt crowned, blinkered by a halo of marsh fog. I observed the flicker of little flame, a prickle of warmth on my jeans. “Huh,” I said. That was my best eloquent admiration for the trajectory of heat and light.

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The Egg

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

We’re sitting at the table the way people do
When a family member dies and a stream of well-wishers
Arrive with sympathy and food.

Everyone is concerned for the widow, 70, tough, wiry,
Who now seems weak and befuddled, staring at people
She’s known for years without answering,

Rising and walking out the back door, staring at the woods
At the far end of their land.
Returning to the table without a word.

We’re all thinking how often one spouse dies
Soon after the other, dies of nothing
But lack. Because we are surrounded by guns, her husband’s

Sizeable collection—pistols in glass cases, rifles
In racks and corners—talk turns to their value, the merits
Of revolvers versus semi autos, plinking, protection.

Now, for the first time, the widow speaks, remembering
That she went to the coop this morning and found curled
In a nesting box a snake, unhinged mouth filled

With a whole egg, disappearing a swallow at a time.
She walked back to the house, pulled her .410
Off the rack, returned to the coop and blew its head off.

A hog-nose, she says. A good snake. But I had to.
She shrugs her shoulders. I had to. Glancing
At each other, we nod in agreement, relieved.

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Gun on the Table

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

My favorite scene in Body Heat has nothing
To do with the intricate plot
That William Hurt and Kathleen Turner
Devise to kill her rich, oppressive husband.
My favorite scene, maybe ten seconds long,
Shows Hurt getting into his car as an antique
Convertible drives by, a fully costumed clown
At the wheel, waving. Hurt stares, slightly
Bewildered, while the clown passes and disappears.
That’s it. Cut to Hurt and Turner in another
Sweaty sex scene and post-coital planning,
The foregone noir conclusion closing in. Meanwhile,
Since we know there are no meaningless details
In art, we keep expecting the clown to reappear
Or at least figure indirectly yet clearly in the action.
Like Chekhov said—if there’s a gun on the table
In act one, it had better be fired by act three.
But no, the clown is random, there and gone, an odd,
Unrelated moment like any of the ones that pass us
Every day and we barely notice
Because life isn’t art, isn’t revised for coherence,
Not until our lives collapse around us
Like a circus tent in flames
And we begin to look for the alarm we missed.

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My Life with Pines

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tom Wayman

                                                                     1
In the glow of a fluorescent, I sit leaning
over a table to sort through parts of
a jigsaw puzzle, working hard to recreate
a picture displayed
on the box I purchased
while outside
great pines have moved in the darkness
down the ridge to surround my house, many of the trees
taller than the roof. A fierce wind
causes the pine trunks to sway, their limbs
churning the dark in wild
and pitiless gestures.

                                                                     2
Pines thrive in arid soil, mostly sand,
little else will grow in. These trees regard cedars
who love the damp, who must be surrounded by relatives,

as gloomy, phlegmatic,
timid. Cedars, according to pines, are simple-minded
about safety, suffusing themselves with water

as protection from fire. Cedars might as well be,
pines jeer, a fern. Whereas pines
only reproduce in the heart of a blaze,
their cones needing the insatiable rage of flames
to climax, open, release.

                                                                     3
No matter how many nights, months, decades
I pore over my jigsaw
the one piece that remains to be found
is a pine.

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Activity Room

.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Bargowski

My mother wants nothing to do with the puzzle
two other residents,
whose wheelchairs have been rolled up
to a folding card table,
are trying to put together—
a west side shot of the New York skyline
broken up into a thousand pieces,
the stubborn morning smog
she could see from the apartment
she had to give up photo-shopped out,
the OT insisting Mom join in the fun,
taking my mother’s stroke-locked hand
and guiding it to
a corner piece that’s an easy fit,

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When Time Slows Down

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lawrence Raab

Now I’m lying in a narrow hospital bed,
waiting for the first tests to come back,
raising the cup of apple juice to my lips,
then setting it back on the table
very carefully. I’ve been watching
a large round clock, so much like

the clocks in the schoolrooms
of childhood, where the big hand clicked
loudly as another minute was forced into place.
Was it fourth grade or fifth?

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The Road

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lee Ann Dalton

I left, not looking back. I was afraid.
I left the things he bought me, just in case.
I had to close my eyes to find the road.

I carried names and numbers, tucked inside
a pocket in my purse, and not much else
to leave and not look back. I was afraid

of corners, entryways, store windows, hid
and dodged whole neighborhoods, memory’s curse.
I had to close my eyes to feel the road.

Nights, phone off, lights on, I stood guard
on the balcony, wrapped in please. Worse
than leaving, is not looking back. I was afraid

he’d come slash my tires, stage his suicide
or mine, since I refused to witness his.
Sometimes I closed my eyes to see the road.

I’m still ashamed to say how much I lied
to make him step away, give me the keys
so I could leave, not look back though I was afraid.
I closed my eyes to walk the open road.

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Intercession

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Leonard*

When, years later, I learn Kevin Miller,
the boy who grew up next door, is in jail
for drugs and a stolen car and a gun,
I think of eighth grade:
Kevin with his buck teeth and buzz cut
always getting into fights, Kevin suspended
once for carving the F-word into a church pew
during Wednesday Mass, then again
for slinging walnuts against the windshield
of Mrs. Sabatino’s car.
And that one time, on the field at the end
of the street, where the boys gathered after school
to pick teams, Mark McGarity said,
We don’t want the retard,
meaning my brother—
and Kevin said, What the fuck, man,
and Mark said, Well then prove he can catch a ball,
and when Kevin shrugged and said Fine,
and told my brother to go out for a pass,
and my brother did, but did not catch the ball—
when it bounced twice off the ground,
and my brother looked down at his sneakers,
and Mark told Kevin, Yeah dude, there’s no way,
and all the other boys stood
in a sort of ring, and waited for someone
to hurt someone else—
but instead, Kevin thumped my brother
on the back and said, Let’s go. And my brother—
who may not ever be able to memorize equations
or read, but knows when a man risks himself
for another—
he followed Kevin home to our back yard,
where Kevin threw my brother the football,
and though the ball passed again and again
through my brother’s hands,
Kevin kept throwing, telling my brother
where to move and when, and I can picture, now,
my brother’s face so serious and filled
with concentration—
and Kevin, throwing until their shadows
fell long over the yard.

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Pavlov’s Dog

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Derek JG Williams

I chase my shadow all morning. The neighbors watch
from between drawn curtains.

I tear up clumps of lawn until my blood churns how it does
when the bell rings. I sit in the sun and pant.

Next time I’ll lunge for his throat. But the bell sounds
and I love him still. When I run away, it’s to nowhere

special. There’s a certain slant of moon
I seek. It changes the angle of my longing.

Hunger is the pain I can’t be free of—when I’m sitting
in the sun I love him.

I’m never free. I’ll lunge for his throat. The neighbors will say
I told you so.

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Photograph Albums

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

“We finally got all of our family photos
Onto our home computer,” Quentin was saying,
Just as we entered the Asian fusion place.

And that’s when it hit me: all those leather albums
With their matted pages and bristly hides,
In their mundane way as archly ceremonial

As the Golden Dragon preening against
The restaurant window. All those cumbersome tomes,
In a decade or so defunct as the dinosaur.

But once their images have all been scanned,
Why should it matter? By then the cherished snapshots
Will have all gone into the world of light—

Or at least into cyberspace. Ancestral faces
That once unfurled from trays of salty water
As dark as Lethe, and then were pinned on strings,

Ex-voto like, and left to dry, will seem
A little less spooky-stern without the shades
Of their twentieth century negatives to haunt us.

And pantheons of illumination so vast
They promised we’d see ourselves reflected in
Their image forever—Olympus, Polaroid, Kodak—

Will shrink to the candle-watt stature of household gods:
Preservers of birthday parties and graduations,
Penátes of pointed hats and obnoxious horns.

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For My 1st Ex-Lover to Die

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Francesca Bell

I heard this morning my old lover died, and I cannot say I loved him, though I may have said it at the time, cannot say he was a good person or lover or anything other than a man who called me in the small hours, driving back roads drunk in his Ferrari, when I was 23 and he was 50, who bought me books and a Lalique clock that’s been broken 20 years, who was the dumbest smart person I ever knew, crying in his car at 4 in the morning, wearing a coyote skin coat that reached to his shoes, and I didn’t want his money or his cocaine or to be his 7th wife, and I’ve seldom thought of him except to remember a dark animal crossing his driveway at night, and the 2 staircases in his grand house, going up, going down, and how I held him, deep in my body, and he made a small, sad sound.

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Dialing The Dead

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’d never call.
First of all, I’d be intruding, and besides
I can see my dead friend with all his dead friends
even now, translucent, weightless, winging
through a cloud or sitting in a circle
on some creaky, folding chairs—
Hello, my name is Peter and I’ve
been dead ten years, car wreck.
Hello my name is Edith and I’ve
been dead a week, pneumonia.
Hello, my name is Frank and I’ve been . . . .

Oh, I know they’d all be friendly but even
dialing later when I guess he’d be alone
I’d have too many questions:
If you’re nowhere now and nothing
is this the same as everywhere and everything?
And, Peter, do you sleep in heaven?
Do you eat up there?
What’s the weather anyway?
And that tenderness of heart we try so hard
to keep a secret: in heaven we’re
wide open, aren’t we?
Stay in touch.
No, don’t.

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Last Call

.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Penny Zang

Each night, after work, we changed our names. We were trying on new identities, seeing which ones fit. Serena and I would throw off our aprons and get undressed in the car, wiggling into tight black pants and shirts thin as napkins. Sometimes we wore red lipstick, sometimes eye glitter. Then we’d find a new bar with the same tattered barstools we were used to balancing on, the same veil of smoke and low light that felt like home. To the men who approached us, we turned into different girls, ones who knew how to charm even without the promise of making a tip.

Our new names were decided on the spot, never the same name twice. They were names we’d once used for our baby dolls, names we’d wished our moms had given us: Isabel, Deanna, Lily. Everything else came later—our stories, our new personalities—fueled by beer and tequila, a practiced game of improvisation. Sometimes men invited us home or out to their car. Sometimes the night just fizzled and we’d stumble out to the street in the wrong direction, too lost to even know it. We’d stop to eat greasy pizza and compare notes, our throbbing feet the only part of us that wanted to give up.

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Sitting in a Simulated Living Space at the Seattle Ikea

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Finalist, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest

To sit in a simulated living space at Ikea
is to know what sand knows
as it rests inside the oyster.
This is how you might arrange your life
if you were to start from scratch:
a newer, better version of yourself applied
coat by coat, beginning with lamplight
from the simulated living room.
The man who lives here has never killed.
There is no American camouflage drying
over the backs of his kitchen chairs,
no battle studies on the coffee table.
He travels without a weapon,
hangs photographs of the Taj Mahal,
the Eiffel Tower above the sofa.
The woman who lives here has no need
for prescriptions or self-help:
her mirror cabinet holds a pump
for lotion and a rose-colored water glass,
her nightstand is stacked with hardcovers
on Swedish architecture. The cat who lives here
has been declawed, the dog rehomed.
There are no parking tickets in the breadbox,
no parakeets shrilling over newspaper
in the decorative cage by the desk.
When you finish your dollar coffee
and exit through the simulated front door,
join other shoppers with chapsticks
in their purses and Kleenex and receipts,
with T-shirts that say Florida Keys 2003
and unopened Nicorette blisters in their pockets,
you will wish you could say this place
is not enough for you, that you are better off
in the harsh light of the parking garage,
a light that shows your skin beneath your skin,
the color of your past self,
pale in places, flushed in others.

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The Game

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steven Cramer

Let me clarify some things about the game.
First rule: think about the game, you’ve lost.
No tiles, cards, currency, whirling dials: all pieces

are included, space has been cleared at the table.
Join in. Your turn. Kids learn the game in school
corridors, score it in red along their forearms,

new staves on old. It doesn’t end when the day ends:
race for the stairs, dodging the geeks and slow kids,
thunder of fists on lockers, last push to the streets.

The old hands they become play all night, by daylight
a winner still in doubt. Friction Ridge, Lake of Enclosure,
Dot and Spur: its variants can wear a pencil to its nub.

Wedded to the game, couples bop to the Heart-Flip,
the Mind-Winder, later to lie on sheets deliberately
left blank. Who invented the game? Who made up

the jokes passed from laugh to laugh? Black suit
for weddings, same for the funeral. In between, quick
as a nail sparks an Ohio Blue Tip, it fixes in its sights

the boy who puffs, walks; leaves in a down of frost
crushed beneath his feet. At the ridge he’ll climb,
sun warms the girl expecting him, curve of her hand

moist to take him. When he comes, the game beats
in his heartbeat thumped by the wallop of her heart
beating against his; and like a spider tumor, spins

webs in his brain, in love now with how it’s played.

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A Theory of Violence

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro

In the museum of sex, the video loops
its cycle of common bonobo behavior:
penis fencing, genital rubbing, whole groups

engaged in frenzied pairs, their grinds and shrieks
playing for the edification of each patron
passing through the room. We all summon

our best poker faces. One woman speaks
softly, reads from the sign that describes
all the various partner combinations,

the multitude of positions, how relations
lower aggression, increase bonding within tribes.
We linger over this way of making peace,

wonder to each other if we would cease
our litany of guns, bombs, missile strikes
if we spent more time in wild embrace.

The exhibit doesn’t mention our other cousins,
chimpanzees, who form border patrols, chase
strangers in their midst, leave mangled bodies as lessons.
That’s the story we already know

and want to forget through the release
of these erotic halls, where we seek the thrill, the bliss

of these animals who hold us captive
while we lament what traits we’ve found adaptive.

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Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

Selected as runner-up for the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro

All he found when he came looking for us was the home my mother wanted to leave behind: newspapers stacked knee-deep in the hallways, every corner redolent of cat piss, linoleum caked with dried mud and dust, tangles of hair matted to the tub, dried scabs of meals coating plates and bowls piled high in the sink, on counters. Everywhere: the stink, the rot and mold, the great heaps of unwashed clothes, all the filth my mother never let anyone see. No friends allowed inside. Even her dates didn’t get in the door. She spent her nights at their dubious dens, leaving me alone to toss hamburger wrappers and soda cups on the living room floor, our one trashcan so full I couldn’t empty it. My father, finding all this mess, assumed the worst, took photos, jotted notes, thinking the house had been ransacked, that we’d been robbed, killed or kidnapped, though police assured him there were no signs of struggle. How she’d let the house go, he couldn’t imagine. Before the divorce, I heard her shout: I’m no one’s maid. Years later, when my father asks how we lived in such squalor, I tell him I never noticed at the time, though once I did: My best friend, Heather, and I were playing outside when a sudden shower drove us to huddle under the eaves. Soaked, I took pity, opened the door, disobeying my mother’s one rule. Inside, Heather didn’t ask questions about the mildew, the crumpled paper bags she had to brush aside to sit. She refused the towel I handed her to undo the work of the rain. I saw it then: tatty, gray, stained. Heather left, and later, when my mother found the couch still wet, I told the truth. Her face flushed; I tried to bolt. She reined me in with one hand, unfastened her belt. If they see this, they’ll take you from me, she screamed through the volley of blows. My back grew a rope of welts. They’ll call me unfit. Is that what you want? I tell my father none of this, judge it best not to show him the last bits of how his ex fell apart once they were unhitched. I don’t say how I, too, was the mess, tether she yearned to slip, so she could careen unimpeded through life, how I held tight as she zoomed away, raced toward a place where she’d be no one’s mother, no one’s wife.

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Envy

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Patricia Horvath

The sign on the door says: Children Under 18 Not Admitted to the Chemotherapy Suite Under Any Circumstances.

They call it a suite, this room at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital where chemotherapy is administered, as though its occupants were members of some elite group, which in a sense I suppose they are. For reasons that elude me, the chemotherapy suite is located on the same floor as maternity services, and the elevator is often crowded with an odd mix of cancer patients and pregnant women. The cancer patients are generally hairless, elderly, their skin ashy, their bones prominent. The pregnant women are all flesh and smiles.

On Jeff’s first day of chemo, three months earlier, a couple made out during the entire ride to the eleventh floor. Teenagers practically, they wore tight jeans, cropped vinyl jackets. Her back hard against the elevator rail, her distended belly pressed into her partner. They made little moaning noises as they kissed. I tried to give Jeff my “What the fuck is this?” look, but he was too preoccupied—or maybe too polite—to notice. The other passengers looked away. I watched them not watching and then I stared at the floor.

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Seafood

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Williamsen

           Baltimore, Maryland

My uncle calls from the wharf; his freighter is in;
he’s walked to the nearest food and I find him
in a crab shack at a table by the window.
Waitresses carry crabs on trays, whole piles of them—
stiff, blue, dead—and the restaurant patter crackles
with the brittle speech of small mallets on their shells.
Elena, his wife—she’s from Colombia, my age—
wants a divorce. She’s living in Miami
with some Cuban, he says; she’s got his TV and his car.
When his crabs come, I order grilled cheese,
tell him about karma, how I’ve removed myself
from the chain of suffering and he says, shit,
picks up a crab and whacks it squarely on the back.
He tells me about winters on Superior, ice boats
cracking a path through December until the solid freeze
of January, how he shoveled iron ore from the hold
until the red dust rose in clouds from his clothing,
rinsed from his body in the shower like a gallon of blood;
and before that, how he went to Vietnam while my father
went to college, how he bombed the jungle beneath him
without ever looking down while my father dropped
out of college without ever looking ahead;
and before that, before the war, how the two of them
hit a tree one night while driving on River Road.
You’d have thought we wanted to be that tree, he says.
It broke the car, broke seven of his ribs, nearly broke
my father’s heart but in the end it just broke his spleen
and ripped him open from shoulder to hip.
My great aunt—the whole family tells the story now—
came from Kansas and prayed him back from the dead.

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Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1-12

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

I. I’m at a poetry convention and wish I were at Comic Con. Everyone is wearing boring T-shirts.

When I give the lady my name, she prints it wrong onto the name tag. I spell it and she gets it wrong again. Let’s be honest: it’s still my fault.

II.
Japanese tsunami debris
is starting to wash up
on the Pacific shore. At first,
they trace back the soccer balls,

motorcycles, return them
to their owners. That won’t last.

Read More

Coins for the Ferryman

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By David Denny

Marlene and Ralph walked up Kaanapali Beach about half a mile from their hotel. They sat in a corner of an outdoor restaurant with a floor of sand. Each of the small, round tables was shaded by an umbrella made of palm leaves. A row of tropical greenery, punctuated with orange and red hibiscus, separated the restaurant from the boardwalk. They could hear the waves hitting the sand about forty feet away. 

Marlene slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the cool sand as she looked over the menu. Mahi was her new favorite; however, she’d eaten it two days in a row and thought she should try something else. Up next to the bar, a local singer was nearing the end of his lunchtime set. He took a slug of water, traded his guitar for a ukulele, and began crooning the popular island version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Marlene wasn’t all that hungry. A shrimp cocktail and a Diet Coke might do the trick. Her husband had his cell phone out on the table in front of him, checking their reservation for the dinner cruise out of Lahaina harbor. He had decided before he left the hotel that he would order a burger; he was tired of fish already. 

Read More

Whatever I Might Say

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle’s low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends.

The glow takes me to Creston MacArthur, one son’s and one grandson’s namesake, and to our many evenings as a campfire ebbed. Just now I’m remembering a particular night, the two of us seated next to a favorite river, swapping stories. His were better.

A bleakness sinks into me despite the patent pleasures of this later interlude with other people I care for and admire. I’ve long savored their camaraderie, their conversation, their gifts for wit. The lateness of the hour has turned our talk to rote murmuring, something like the water of that river, which always flows right below my consciousness.

I should do more now than merely prattle with these good companions, just as I should have said more to Creston, gone almost forty years, and perhaps he to me. Or maybe not: deep in the woods, barred owls started to chatter that night. “Like a good pack of hounds,” Creston said, and that woodsy locution seemed perfect, seemed pinpoint accurate.

Still I’m unsettled. It’s as though I were looking on these people here, on my children, on my children’s children, on my past—I’m looking from above. Having failed to put the right words together, I’ve risen over our group like smoke. The chill in my spirit has something to do with feeling removed, and feeling removed because I’m tongue-tied, tongue-tied for fear that any speech of mine will sound formulaic.

It’s late. The guests will leave. The candle’s wick whispers. I must hope I’ve found a way of being with loved ones that’s better than any talk I could grope for, than any I craved as those old fires grayed, a way that bespoke me better than whatever I may have said, whatever I might say now.

Read More

The Pain Suit

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

If you happen to live in a broad and open place,
you can watch as it comes flying in your direction—

not really a suit, of course, just the mask and gloves,
though considering its effect, the term is apt.

You can’t hope it’s hunting some stranger, since everyone knows
that it’s visible only to its destined bearer;

you can’t clutch at bystanders, seeking a human shield,
since it passes through every obstruction without even slowing.

It’s probably best to become a city-dweller,
surrounded by walls, oblivious to its approach,

unless you’re one of the those fools who step forward to meet it,
flexing their fingers to feel for the cleanest fit.

Read More

Tropospheric

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

For all the times
we’ve checked the weather,

why won’t it reciprocate,
inquiring into our condition,
our immediate and long-term forecasts?

Is it oblivious, incurious,
self-absorbed?

Maybe it can’t distinguish us
from other natural features—
the wind gap, the echo hall.

Maybe it can’t perceive us,
not even as spaces
between the spaces,

though its least breath is epic,
having passed through
each of us

as we labor to articulate
all that we’re determined
to withhold.

Read More

Purchase

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

At last the heirloom china rides
cupboardless, exposed and free
upon Suspension™.

Books float alphabuoyantly unshelved
upon Suspension™.

Bartenders slide their brews
frictionless
along Suspension™.

At the Louvre,
tourists circumnavigate
the Mona Lisa
enthroned in sheerness now
upon Suspension ™.

Even the lowly toothbrush
rests its bristles, moist,
upon Suspension™.

And though we still shape
our shirts on hangers
as in days of yore,

now we’re free to set them dangling
everywhere,

just as we arrange our limbs
to sleep upon transparency

anywhere.

Nevertheless,
we can’t agree:

is there less
or more clutter
since we unanimously opted
for Suspension™?

Read More

Tutti Frutti for Me

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Andrea Simon

I’m watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the giant Admiral 21-inch console television, and I can’t wait for the commercial to raid the freezer and see if there’s any ice cream. My father, mother, and sister are in the living room; and it’s no use asking them because my father would not answer me, my sister would order me to bring her a bowl of whatever I find, and my mother would say that I should look myself if I want anything that badly. Besides, what I’m longing for does not exist in this small Brooklyn apartment. I need to find tutti frutti ice cream, and the only flavors my mother buys are butter pecan for my father and chocolate for my sister. Every time I tell my mother that I don’t have the same taste as my sister, she seems surprised and says, “Why, I thought chocolate was your favorite.” I always answer her with the truth, “I love vanilla.” But it may as well be tutti frutti because she never listens to me.

The reason I’m crazy with the tutti frutti is because in the show, the Nelsons see a story in the newspaper about a police sergeant who was keeping a lost boy happy with a large tutti frutti cone, entertaining him until his parents showed up. This is the one night the Nelsons decided to forgo dessert in order to cut down on calories. Ricky, the troublemaker, wants tutti frutti badly. Darning socks, wearing a high-necked sweater with a double strand of pearls, Harriet Nelson says, “I haven’t tasted tutti frutti in years.”

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Feature: Should Poems Tell the Truth?

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Mid-way through my freshman year at college, my roommate, Roger, asked if I would read a poem he’d written and tell him what I thought. I was pleased to be considered a literary person whose opinion might be valued. And my roommate, who would major in geology, had previously shown no interest in poetry. “Of course,” I said.

The subject of the poem was the death of Roger’s father, and I felt a small shock in reading it, since no one I knew had yet lost a parent. Unfortunately, Roger’s poem was a very bad poem. I don’t now remember the various ways in which it failed, but there seemed no doubt in my mind. Given the subject, however, what kind of criticism would be appropriate or bearable?

I began by expressing my condolences, and Roger interrupted quickly to say, No, his father hadn’t really died. That was just the subject of the poem. “But you can’t do that!” I exclaimed. Perhaps I didn’t actually exclaim, or even say it directly. But it was what I felt. This was wrong, a violation of some rule or code. You couldn’t do it, or you shouldn’t.

Read More

Feature: Where Are You Really From? Reading and Writing Place and Experience

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Adrienne Su

Maxine Kumin’s poem “Encounter in August” describes a standoff between gardener and black bear over a crop of beans:

                                Inside the tepee that admits
                                sunlight to the underpart
                                he stands eating my Kentucky Wonders.
                                Downs pod after pod, spilling the beans,
                                the ones I’d saved for shelling out
                                this winter, thinking soup
                                when he’d gone deep, denned up.

The speaker stands ten feet from the bear and watches him devour her beans. The bear doesn’t notice her while he polishes off the season’s yield. The danger to the gardener goes unstated; mainly, we feel her indignation and loss. The encounter ends with the bear’s oblivious departure and the speaker’s effort to make peace with what has happened:

                                At last he goes the way the skunk
                                does, supreme egoist, ambling
                                into the woodlot on all fours
                                leaving my trellis flat and beanless
                                and yet I find the trade-off fair:
                                beans and more beans for this hour of bear.

Read More

Feature: A Brief Response

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Louise Glück

Frankly, I have no idea why this should be any sort of problem. I love discovering that a reality, or what I experienced as a reality, is invented, that a world has been contrived to provide context for a set of perceptions, or for a voice that is almost by definition other than the poet’s in some way. Pretty much nothing I write is literally true, and very little is borrowed from someone else’s stories, which seems to me immoral. A voice presents itself and around that voice events form. I love this in fiction and assume it In poetry. Otherwise we’d all be hopelessly limited.

Read More

Feature: Telling the Truth in Poetry

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

All good poems must be truthful, but the truthfulness they embody is not that of accuracy to historical fact but fidelity to what might be called the facts of the human condition. In the service of discovering and expressing fundamental attitudes toward life, poetry is allowed, with some qualifications, a license similar to that accorded to fiction and drama: the freedom to substitute imagined materials for those it finds ready-made in the world. Poetic license means that William Wordsworth would have been free to write a poem about meeting a leech-gatherer even if he had never met one in the flesh, that Matthew Arnold would have been free to write a poem about standing on the beach at Dover with his sweetheart without ever having been to Dover, that Robert Frost would have been free to write a poem about picking apples even if he had never picked apples, if, say, a bone spur in his left foot had made it too painful for him to use a ladder. The demands of the poem itself are allowed to take precedence over any demand for strict autobiographical accuracy.

Read More

Feature: “Father”

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Michael Ryan

Like almost every other MFA graduate then and since, I couldn’t get a teaching job in 1972 after I earned my degree. My teachers—Marvin Bell and Donald Justice—kindly offered to let me stay and work on The Iowa Review if I enrolled in the PhD program and thereby qualified for graduate student support. So I did. The magazine was staffed mostly by workshop students like me and to entertain ourselves we tacked on the office bulletin board particularly psychotic submission cover letters. My favorite was a five-page letter handwritten in red ink whose salutation was “Fuck you, Iowa Review Pig” and went on from there with further compliments about the quality of our magazine and our excellent judgment concerning previous submissions that we had declined to publish. I’d go into the office a couple afternoons a week and screen poems. There were a mountain of them (the magazine was already getting thousands of submissions a year). After a few weeks of this, I developed the skill to reject poems based on cover letters ranging from the aforementioned “Fuck you, Iowa Review Pig” to “I enclose some Christmas verses my pastor enjoyed so much.”

I still remember opening an envelope that contained no cover letter at all and this poem:

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 15 (Originally published in Spring 2014)

.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 15 compiled by Jade Braden.

Fear of the Bird Migration

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: Bird by Peter Takal

I was attempting
the old familiar,
the regular slog,
when I slipped into
missing her again,
the child my wife and I
would never have.
Sometimes she was
a girl and sometimes
a boy. But like heaven,
I held her there
in my mind, a place
of light where nothing
is done, but all is felt.
She was a multitude.
The great uncapturable
plasm of love. Often
she was only
a finch’s thin line across
a rice-paper sky, tearing
through all stations of life.
The way she might
have worn her hair,
or adorned the surprising aspect
of surface-self for appeal.
Or how the supremacy
of personality might emerge,
wriggling out as it does.
Or the first run-in with
terrible, terrible sexuality.

Read More

Cups

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cecilia Pinto

Featured Art: Resting by Antonio Mancini

Many years ago I watched a documentary about people with mental illness. One of the patients presented was a young woman who had been institutionalized. Despite being an adult physically, she acted like a little girl and lived in a room filled with dolls. She wanted more than anything to be spanked because she equated this with love. No one would comply with her request which made her desperate and upset.

I have remembered this.

            

In another documentary I learned of a girl who had been kept in severe isolation and abused for most of her young life. Her deprivation left her sensitive to light and without language. Partial rehabilitation was achieved but it was noted that the girl felt it absolutely necessary to keep multiple glasses of liquids in her room.

When I think about the first young woman, I see her story line in a candy-colored palette, baby pinks, blues and soft yellows. The curtains billow, the bedclothes pool, there are fat, dancing animals with little eyes.

The second girl’s images are black, white and gray. The girl moves through her story like an animated charcoal drawing; sketchy, vibrating lines, electric black hair, skittering movements. I think of black crows flapping into the sky, the glint in their eyes, the glint in the water in all the glasses. She carries glasses of water in front of her as if she is a priestess.

Read More

My Keats Year

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Davis May

Featured Art: Tea Party with Open Pottery by Seymour Rosofsky

Shouldn’t it be I’m disappointed by (or because of) and not in you?

We were watching Stellar’s jays—I didn’t know their names then,
I addressed the first one as “Monsieur Mohawk”—watch us,
or watch our meal rather. I don’t know if birds feel disappointment,
but as they flitted around the perimeter of the patio
with an odd combination of aggression and timidity,
their feet on the sun-bleached railing
making sounds like a hand searching a filled drawer
for something that’s not in the drawer,
the diminishment of cereal must have been processed
as the bird-equivalent of disappointment.

When I picked up Chelsea’s bowl and took it inside to the sink,
I thought of California (it was my first time in the state),
and then of Robinson Jeffers,
and then of the time Jeffers realized
he was older than Keats when Keats died, and then I realized
I was older than Jeffers when he realized this.

He was taking firewood back to his house and had to walk over a very narrow
bridge, one that his dog seemed reluctant to cross again. So he left the bundle,
carried the dog over, and then went back for the wood when he was hit by his
age, and then the “insignificance” of what he had written.

And yet we say, “I’m disappointed with myself,”
which sounds redundant.

The woman eating dinner with us the night before told us there was no age she
wanted to go back to. Someone pointed out that she was still young.

Read More

Mystery Object

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Galvin

Featured Art: The Art of Living by Saul Steinberg

You come out of the room where everyone is doing karaoke
and ask why I’m ignoring you.
I want to say something that suggests I’ve endured
some exotic, indescribable torture

but a completely mundane thing has happened,
which is you have stopped loving me.
So, even though your body is here, you are gone
and bodies are becoming less like a procession of individuals
than a texture like wet cement, but also like words that say,
“Why would you subscribe to such a mystery object”

and I think, it’s funny the cement forms words, especially these words
but something isn’t right about the word “subscribe” in this context
and I can’t tell if the sentence is a question or a statement—
Why is there no punctuation?
I want to run, but I’m already travelling in every direction at once.

Read More

The Darkest Part of the Cloud

.Reading time 46 minutes.

By Jessica Langan-Pack

Featured Art: Wheatfield by Georges Braque

My daughter is nine, and she has recently grown taller and lost most of her softness. Now she’s a thin and delicate thing with very straight, very smooth hair that she wears in bangs across her forehead. She is afraid of bees. She is afraid of forest fires, and of strangers, and of a book she read called The Face on the Milk Carton, which is about a little girl who sees her own face on a missing children poster. She is articulate and serious and very imaginative. When she finds out, at the beginning of her summer vacation, that her father is losing his memory, not slowly, or gracefully, but at a possibly alarming rate, what she decides to do is remember everything.

“So that you can tell him?” I ask her. For a few weeks I have been thinking of my head as an empty room of some kind, and sometimes my voice reverberates off its walls. We are sitting in the kitchen eating cereal.

She shrugs. “Just so I don’t forget.” She is at a stage where she has trouble differentiating between other people, real or fictitious, and herself. I wonder if she is afraid of losing her own memory.

Read More

The Professional

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

She arrived in a dark suit and a mask-like smile, explaining
her services in a manner so polished it almost put us off.
This is my specialty, she soothed. Both mind and house
will be empty as a mountain wind once I’m done. I sensed
she’d said those words before. We sat at the kitchen table,
you and I, looking at one another, hoping the other felt more
certain, more assured. Once we signed, it would take years
before we acknowledged our mistake. She’d left the whole day
open, and could begin immediately. Was there perhaps a guest
room where she could change? Her assistant arrived with
a black duffel, fresh white towels, and a stainless-steel basin.

I didn’t know the basin would be so big, I murmured. We looked
at one another uncomfortably. It is not always a clean process,
she reassured. You do understand, once I’m sequestered, it is
very important that I not be disturbed. We nodded. She closed
the door with an audible click. For the first few hours, it seemed
okay. Her assistant sat out in the van, with the windows down,
reading. We sat in the living room and tried to do the same,
ignoring the sounds coming from the guest room, sighs that
sharpened into cries. When a few faces started disappearing
in the photographs above the piano, you leapt to your feet.
This isn’t right, you said. These things shouldn’t be removed.

But what about the pain? I asked. Don’t you want it gone?
No, you said, pointing to the image of a child, suddenly frantic.
The eyes had faded to nothing. From forehead to cheekbone
was just smooth skin. I ran to the window. The van was gone,
as was the tire-swing that had been there an hour earlier. I looked
and saw the elm losing its limbs, one by one. Maybe we can still
get some of our money back, I said. And then you said: I want her
gone. The assistant had sealed the door shut with tape. It came
off with a spattering sound, and the shrieks from inside paused.
Then the voice came, a strangled croak as I opened the door
and saw her, smaller than I remembered, perched on the dresser,
her suit pooled on the floor beneath her. Her face had become
a sort of beak, hinged open and hissing. But it was the children
that were upsetting, sitting in a circle at her feet, quietly singing.

Read More

Fastball Shy

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Schneider

Featured Art: Gray Spots by Vasily Kandinsky

Hot roller to the shortstop,
me—lean machine
of summer, scuffling
in ballfield yellow dirt.
Off like a hound I go
with my three-finger
Warren Spahn, neatsfoot-
oiled cowhide glove
to gobble that scorched
grounder & fire it
across the diamond
to Tub McMullin’s
fat-handed mitt at First.
Little League? Shit.
This is ultimate Big Time.
        Who knew that stitched
leather ball could baffle
hand & eye? Wild
chance, wicked hop,
they said, nasty chop
direct to the cartilaged
bulge of my Adam’s Apple
dropped me flat, washed
me in starlight. Nerve
& muscle inscribed
with solid-state physics,
I learned to flinch & never
could unlearn that secret.
One rainy afternoon
on Heckman’s front porch
we unraveled it, yards
& yards of yarn down
to the inscrutable rubber
pill, unforgiving hard
center of the world.

Read More

Still Listening

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: Confusion of Christmas by Julia Thecla

I. Hospice Jumble

The Jumble in the paper too hard for him to read,
my mother suggested we make up our own: Dear,

she said to her husband, your first word is life.
Reduced to words we jumbled, he joked file

it. My brother offered another, mean,
thinking perhaps of his diabetes, a name

like cancer to our family. Then, lamp,
lit at his bedside, and the one palm

visible outside his one windowed room.
My father got them quickly, the last, moor,

said with all the sadness of being far from shore . . .
A grandchild solved that one—horse,

she blurted, noticing that he had left
us for a while. By his bed, my mother felt

his hands and face and eyes. Bob, please,
she said, but he was already asleep,

snoring, not dead. My mother sighed, O God.
My brother, in the spirit still, said dog. Read More

My Dead Father Remembers My Birthday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lesley Wheeler

Featured Art: Birthday Party by Margaret Burroughs

Dream-phone rang and I thought: that’s exactly
his voice. I haven’t forgotten. Then: but I could
forget, because he’s dead. Hi, sorry it’s been so long,
but I was sick and the doctors messed everything up.
He made that shrug-noise, dismissive but pained,
meaning he’s lying or leaving something out.
It’s snowing here, and then a click, click, over the line,
and a neutral woman’s voice, slightly officious:
This recording was intercepted. If you wish to replay
this message, dial this number now, and she recited
a blizzard of digits while I flailed
for a pen then found myself tangled in blankets.
The window a bruise beginning to fade.

Here mist wreathes the trunks. In a few months
snow will crisp the grass, insulate and numb the oaks
with feathery layers that would soak and freeze
a human being. When and where is he? Snug,
maybe, watching weather through double panes.
Or wanting to be. I heard a bead of doubt
suspended in his voice, a cool guess he’d missed
something, before my operator intervened,
reason declaring: This is memory. The line is cut.

Read More

A Toast in Cancun

.Reading time 61 minutes.

By Charles Haverty

Featured Art: Oak Street Beach, Chicago by Terry Evans

Everyone in his new life warned Ferris not to go to Cancun. They said Cancun was to drinking what Las Vegas was to gambling. “They even drink in the swimming pools,” his sponsor Leonard told him. “No shit. They belly up to the bar right there in the water.” He’d been sober for four months, a week, and three days, but Caitlin was his only sister and he her only brother and this was her wedding. So there he stood, sweating on the beach in the wrong suit, the darkest figure in the sand-colored crowd. With the ceremony behind him, only the reception, the night, and a taxi ride to the airport separated Ferris from the plane that would carry him back to Indiana and his quiet, normal life.

It was five o’clock, with two hours to kill before the beachside reception, and as guests blew soap bubbles in lieu of throwing rice, he felt an arm encircle his waist, his father’s arm, steering him back through the bubbles toward the empty rows of white chairs. His father was a well-kept man of fifty-nine, youthful and perpetually tan, and though he’d been all smiles walking Caitlin down the makeshift aisle, he looked ashen now, diminished. “We need to talk,” he said. “Not here. Alone. Mano a mano.” They agreed to meet poolside once his father was through posing for photos with the wedding party. He took hold of Ferris’s sleeve. “Don’t fail me, Son,” he said, and that Son frightened Ferris more than anything. As he followed the concrete path that ran alongside the beach, the urge to drink, to counteract his renewed sense of dread, was near irresistible. He had to call Leonard.

Read More

Patina

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Untitled by Vija Clemins

In your prime, shape presents itself first,
the angle and curve of one thing,
the size of something else,
or the way her hair flows volcanically

along each subtle slope and swell.
It is crazed, intense, super-heated,
even the soles of your boots feel sticky,

because she’s entered you, you know this,
she charts the very map of your blood,
and that eyelid twitch you have going,
they’ll claim is stress and dehydration,

but it’s her, pal, all her, she floods places
you’ve never named in yourself,
she proffers the pulse, the duende, the élan,
that jackhammer of lust
outside the Fiesta Ware outlet. . . .

But one day, it just happens,
a man’s eyes cloud and change,
you don’t feel with the same ardor
the way she moves, her confident posture,

no, suddenly it is color you notice,
the grays, the yellows, the bruised surfaces
tinged with a silver-green, almost a tarnish,
as if her skin were a metal,

and not such a precious one, either,
more like pewter or the common alloys
of soot-smudged medieval artisans,
something to be re-shaped, hammered thin,
become useful and used.

Read More

Finality

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Jonny Dunn’s Sandwich Shop, Paducah, Kentucky by Walker Evans

She did not fit her body anymore—
she was lost inside it—
not like some punished child
wincing in the corner of a vast room—
not, either, like a ring fitted snug in its box—
more like the single yellow pill
in her white medicine cup—
that’s how she was, waiting—
carving precise cubes
from a thin lamb chop, chewing
with such listless fatigue,
I feared she might never finish,
and so pretended that by looking away
I was preserving her dignity.

Chewing and swallowing—
that’s how I remember her—
not as a face or even sequence of faces,
but as a complex montage,
a simultaneous superimposition
of every face she’d worn since birth. Read More

A Distant Relative

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Ryan Meany

Featured Art: Coffee and Cigarettes by Ken Schles

Mom called Friday to say Linda died.
At least two people I don’t like at work
I know better than Aunt Linda. I carried her
casket yesterday, because my grandmother asked,
along with younger cousins, strangers I recognize from childhood,
tough men I see only as the children they were
in bony faces, stubble. The babies they were
they’ve locked up deep: Dusty on military disability
with three kids, and Billy, who used to be Little Billy,
with a court date for driving 137. My grandmother
looked like a Treasure Troll in tired skin, white broken
hair refusing to go down. When I hugged her the life in her was small
as a niece, her lineage drained out all around her. She reminded me
I was her first grandbaby in that smoky Southern Baptist
vibrato. A few days before, on Sunday, when I’d come to her house,
she talked like she’d long ago forgiven me for mostly staying away
for twenty years. I was glad she didn’t know the trouble I’ve caused, especially
because I doubt she’d love me less. My senior picture hung in her living room
as if I were as important as all these grandkids and great grandkids
who wondered who I was. Soon she’ll be dead and I won’t be so important.
So many people took turns holding her
the funeral seemed to be hers. I had no right to want to save her
from thinking, when I was helping to carry her daughter’s body,
that I’d soon be carrying her body, as I’d carried my grandfather’s body
just a couple years before, which was actually six years before.
We were not sad that, to time, we were like grass
under the feet of pallbearers. I was sad because
the time I had in common with this side of the family
we’d mostly forgotten, another thing my grandmother would die knowing.
The last time I saw Aunt Linda was outside the hospital
in the courtyard for smoking. I was there visiting someone
who’d mixed Vicodin and vodka to find out who cared. I can’t remember
why Aunt Linda was there, her heart or her brain. Her brain
would cause the most trouble later, a popped vessel, then
another, the top of her skull removed, screams
from the headaches and so many drugs, according to my grandmother
as we smoked outside Sunday morning. She’s at peace,
I said. Already we were down to our last words.

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At the Grave of Sadie Thorpe

.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Miles Harvey

Featured Art: A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by Walker Evans

Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. . . . In most of these times, we do not exist;
in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

“Was she a relative of yours?” the old man asks, leading me toward your grave.

“Well, not exactly,” I begin to reply. “She—”but then I pause. In the middle of my sentence, in the middle of my life, in the middle of some small-town cemetery in the middle of the Midwest, I pause, unable to explain who you are or why I’m here. What I would tell the man, if it didn’t sound so absurd, is that although I am not your descendant, although I only recently learned of your existence, although you barely left a mark on the world, and although your corpse was buried here more than forty years before I was born, I can’t get you out of my mind. What I would recount, if I could figure out a simple way to do it, is the history of happenstance that connects me to you across the years, a bond that at this moment feels almost as strong as the ties of blood. What I would confess, if I wasn’t worried he’d laugh in my face, is that I woke up this morning, a couple months shy of my fiftieth birthday, certain I had to drive more than one-hundred miles from Chicago to visit a total stranger’s grave in this tiny hamlet of Dana, Illinois.

A dog barks in the heat of this August afternoon. A killdeer swoops in on slender wings, offering its distinctive call: kill-dee, dee-dee-dee, kill-dee, deedee-dee. And still I pause.

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Hook and Eye

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sarah Barber

Featured Art: Untitled (Woman’s Arm and Bra) by Ralph Gibson

Often I have unfastened it myself
without tragedy. But I wanted you
to stand behind me—in fact
a fourteenth-century town
of needle manufacturers crocheted
loops from wire because they wanted
your hands just so terribly
close and a little bit slow
at the closure too aggressively
latched to unhook at the will
of its wearer, which is what was said
to sell it to nineteenth-century ladies,
not quite promising exactly such
an unhooking of their dresses
and all those garments, and indeed
as early as 1643 a woman in Maryland
traded £10 worth of tobacco for hooks
and eyes only because she wanted
you to stand behind me
as the fastening came undone.

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Rome in Us

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Thomas Grout

Featured Art: The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy by John Singer Sargent

It’s funny isn’t it—the way Rome still comes at you
fast like a bat breaking past your head from memory.
At the Roman pace the body takes the city better than the mind.
A cathedral ceiling’s fireworks shoot up
once the sermon’s fireworks stop. And when
the ceiling finally stills, the piazza outside overfills
with new fruits and vegetables and etymologies.
Stimulation’s cheap as wine and your horse
is more than happy to take it in by trough.
But it flies by so fast—

only just now it’s slowed enough to hatch a feeling
similar to how it is to listen through the dark over our bed
for a half-caught sound to sound again.
That given one more chance I could make easy sense of it.

It’s often that I sleepwalk down our subdivision’s version
of the Spanish Steps thinking I left something unnamable
inside the Trevi. Is that it at the end of the tube-slide?
I never know. It all gets hazy after the Flaminian gate
though I’m absolutely certain I wake up at the refrigerator.
Rome is in us like unfinished business—

that’s why half of me is still sauntering the cobbles.
I guess we’ll always live our lives possessed
by the ancient Roman sense that down any old left turn
suddenly one of our dreams might find its title.

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Connect

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Glen Pourciau

Featured Art: Mall of America, Minnesota by Melanie Einzig

We were in a Mexican restaurant at the mall, and my husband, as is his habit, was looking at everything but me. I still had half an enchilada left, but Boyd’s empty plate had already been removed and he’d ground through all the tortilla chips and salsa on the table, leaving his eyes and mind free to survey the room. His attention was drawn to the occupants of a booth across and at a slight angle from ours. He could see them better than I could, but I peeked back and saw a man and woman, presumably married, and a young intellectually disabled boy, the boy seated on the man’s side, which may have appealed to Boyd. The three of them were a picture of happiness, talking and smiling and enjoying one another. If the boy was their son they’d likely been married at least ten years, and I admit I couldn’t help comparing how they seemed to how we were after fifteen years. Read More

Pythagoras

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bruce Bond

Featured Art: Broken and Restored Multiplication by Suzanne Duchamp

Somewhere beneath the crematorium
of stars, the mystery and the boredom,
the vacuum that every space abhors,
you might stop to listen to no one there
and hear the words of a dead man, a Greek,
who measured nights in increments of music.
The sky then was a calliope of numbers
whose tune was everywhere and therefore far
away as dead men are. No such thing
as solitude among them. It takes a string
of intervals on heaven’s monochord
to pull the sounds from one another, the choir
of which must be silent, surmised, and yet
each ghost note dies into the next to hear it.

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Bobcat

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mikko Harvey

Featured Art: Forest by Werner Drewes

Walking through the woods / at midnight / we were on our way / to the pond / where we
would skinny dip / when two yellow eyes / appeared on the path / we froze / they didn’t
blink or move / the body was / hidden by the dark / there was something / sinister in its
stillness / we turned back / you said it was probably / a bobcat / but better not / to take
that chance / we shared a bed / untouching as usual / you fell / asleep first and I wondered
what kept us / apart really / that night / and the others / the distance between us / maybe six
inches / felt like a shadow / I couldn’t step out of / my two open eyes / the only light
in the room / I thought of the animal / blocking our path / and it occurred to me / she was
only a hostess / welcoming us / to the world of risk / smooth and lovely / water hugging
your naked body / the animal said / are you ready / but we walked away / I had an urge
to shake your body / awake and take you back / to the animal and say / confidently yes
table for two / but instead I just lay there / in the perfect / quiet / country / darkness / and
imagined the outline / of your chest rising / and falling / rising / and falling as you slept.

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At the Metropolitan

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Ellen Devlin

Featured Art: New York (Couple on Steps of Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Garry Winogrand

I once saw a Persian sword, in a museum,
glass-boxed, lighted. Warriors on winged
horses charged, lifted scimitars, hundreds of them,
carved in the blue white breath inside the hilt.
I leaned my head on the glass, helpless.

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The Museum of Might-Have-Been

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne-Marie Fyfe

Featured Art: Art Institute of Chicago by Thomas Struth

Opens its doors one Sunday a month
in winter. The queues back up for decades.

If you’re lucky and your number’s called
you can have any tour: Your Charmed Life,
Your Regrets, The Prodigal You, every second
slip-road at the intersections of the possible.

The exhibits are stark and infinite
under strip neon, long hallways
of lost opportunity, slow clocks,
stopped clocks, rooms where even now
a thought might wither: the attic storeroom
is out-of-bounds to all but the curators,
though artifacts are still donated by the hour.

Standing in line is no guarantee
of admission: some days
word spreads that when you
reach the queue’s head, pass through
the double doors, it’ll be stripped out,
even lightbulbs, with only packing materials
and discarded drapes left. Yet critics insist
The Multiple-Choice Foyer, The Roads-Not-Taken
Gallery, The Back Burner Café are stunning.

Every room’s a tasteful shade of apple-white
apparently. Waxworks and living statues
rehearse at intervals for The Balcony Scene,
The Shining City, The Reconciliation, over
and over, night by night. As in the finest operas.

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A Gift From Wales

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

Featured Art: Shore Line by Howard Giles

Having lingered, on my first trip to Europe, longer
In Paris than I expected, I had to forgo
Walking in Wales. But that didn’t keep me
From becoming deeply indebted to Wales
When I phoned the hotel in Cardiff
To cancel my reservation and save my deposit.
“There’s a letter for you,” the desk clerk said,
In a rich contralto. “Would you like us to send it on?”
“Better read it to me, if you have time,
Since I keep moving.” And that’s how it happened
I heard, as I sat in a booth at the Gard du Nord,
Awaiting the train to Brussels, my mother’s sentences,
Penned in Missouri, delivered with Welsh intonations.
That’s how her usual mix of family news,
Tips about healthy eating, and encouragement
To visit any noteworthy local garden,
Took on an undercurrent of mystery.
That’s why they seemed imbued with the suggestion
My travels were more than a summer’s entertainment,
Were in fact a quest for something just as meaningful
As whatever a knight went searching for
When he rode out from a castle in Wales.
Some truth more practical than a grail
And more surprising would soon be mine
Once I learned to listen to people whose words
I regarded before as predictable and forgettable.
And I had questions about the desk clerk,
Who’d read the letter as if she’d composed it herself,
Inspired by a sincere concern for my well being.
What did it mean, her convincing performance?
If it wasn’t part of her job at the hotel,
Was it part of some other calling
Defined in a legend I didn’t know yet
But would want to learn if the chance were offered?

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Three Houses and a Wish

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: House by a River by Edward Hopper

1. Chevy Chase

Choked up to see the in-ground cellar door
behind the house
I was born in long ago

then had doubts, cell handy,
called older sister far away.

She said, wrong house!
Original had front yard oaks,
big porch . . .

found right house, had no
response at all. Used up tears on
house that didn’t know me from Adam! Read More

My Grandmother the Mohel

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Barbara Hamby

Featured Art: Study of a Baby by Fredrick Goodall

When I tell my mother that a man I know pickets the local hospital
              about what his wife calls “his topic” that is, circumcision
and its evils, she tells me this was my grandmother’s specialty
              as a nurse, and I say, “You’re kidding.” “No. The doctor
she worked for couldn’t stand it, so she did all his circumcisions.
              She loved it!” Loved it? I think—cutting the tips off
boys’ penises? Loved what? The precision? The power? The cries?
              I remember sitting with my mother and grandmother
when I was seven or eight, pretending to play, so I could listen
              to them talk in front of my grandparents’ house
in Washington, 328 Maryland Avenue, and down the tree-lined street
              you could see the Capitol dome looming. A couple
were walking on the sidewalk, and they waved at my grandmother,
              who smiled and waved back. “Are they married?”
my mother asked when they passed. “No,” my grandmother
              answered, “they’re just shacked up.” The cups of my ears
gathered around those words like ravenous Venus Fly Traps,
              because this was just what I had been waiting for,
though I had no idea what it meant, and I knew I couldn’t ask
              or my doll dressing and tuneless singing would be exposed
for the subterfuge they were, and I’d be exiled into the house,
              and this was before my grandfather died, who didn’t think
a woman should drive, but my grandmother taught herself,
              her two little girls in the back seat screaming
as the car jerked over the dirt road behind their house in Kentucky,
              and then after he died, she went to school and became a nurse,
but fifty years later I’m chatting with a man on a plane, who’s returning
              home after spending the day in New York because
he is a mohel and has made this long trip to snip the tip off
              some little boy’s penis, and I think of Mantegna’s painting
of the circumcision of Christ at the Uffizi and kosher laws which
              forbid eating crustaceans, which would mean a sacrifice
of gumbo, boullabaisse, cioppino and fish soups the world over,
              and it was the fried Apalachicola shrimps that broke
the back of my vegetarianism, what in Louisiana they call
              “sramps,” and I’ve heard them called “pinks,” “prawns,”
and sometimes when I’m standing over the stove making a roux
              my life seems to be a kind of gumbo, and if you don’t burn
the water-and-flour paste, then it doesn’t much matter what else
              you throw in, but okra is a must and a couple dozen
oysters, andouille sausage, all your dark mistakes mixed in
              with the brilliant medals and diamond tiaras,
and my grandmother told me she went to her wedding
              in a horse and buggy, a seventeen-year-old girl,
probably a virgin, and little did she know where that road
              would lead her, from canning tomatoes and corn
to snipping the tips off thousands of penises to the nursing home
              where she died, shacked up with all her selves,
that particular gumbo stewing in a body withered by 93 years,
              not knowing anything but that she’d rather be eating
ice cream, driving to Memphis, frying chicken, mashing
              potatoes, baking a cake with blackberries
her daughters picked that morning before walking to school.

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